



AMD" 



D 




Stories of American Hisiory 




9i^4-^ v\??3sJ»3^4«tifcM.iidttfSis*. 



CAIiOLyNSHERWINBAILEY 




Copyright K" 



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Ci)FflRIGHT DEPOSm 




'Proclaiming Liberty to all the World' 



FOR THE CHILDREN'S HOUR SERIES 

BROAD STRIPES 
AND BRIGHT STARS 

Stories of American History 



BY 

CAROLYN SHERWIN BAILEY 

Author of 

'For the Children's Hour," '* Firelight Stories," "Stories 

Children Need , " "For the Story Teller, * ' 

"Tell M« Another Story," etc 



ILLUSTRATED IT 

POWER O'MALLEY 



MILTON BRADLEY COMPANY 

SPRINGFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS 

19 19 



.3 



Copyright 1919 

By MILTON BRADLEY COMPANY 

Springfield, Massachusetts 

All Rights Reserved 



BvaiXep Qualit? Books 



AUG 15 019 

©CLA530543 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 



Pilgrims for Freedom . 

The First Fight . 

The Freeman's Charter 

Following the Beaver's Trail 

At the Gate of Old Harvard 

The White Man's Foot 

Going to London to Visit the King 

Ringing in the Fourth of July . 

Keeping Christmas With General Washington 

The Ghost That Haunted Wall Street 

The Road That Went Out West 

In the Wake op the First Steamboat. 

Cutting the World's Bread 



When Johnny Bull and Brother Jonathan 
Hands ...... 

A Slave Among Slaves 

One Flag, or Two? .... 

Uncle Remus at the White House 

Uncle Sam's Birthday Party 

The Ship the Giants Launched . 

The Town Named After Him 

The Last Fight .... 

A Proclamation 



Shook 



Page 
11 

24 

38 

50 

64 

77 

82 

97 

106 

119 

131 

144 

154 

164 
176 
186 
198 
210 
219 
230 
231 
241 



EDITORIAL NOTE: 

I am indebted as follows for copyrighted 
material appearing in this book: To the 
George W. Jacobs Company for the extract 
from Historic Inventions by Rupert S. Hol- 
land; to Doubleday Page and Company for 
A Slave Among Slaves from Up From Slavery 
by Booker T. Washington. The White Man's 
Foot is used by permission of and special 
arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Com- 
pany. Mrs. Mary Stuart Cutting has given 
permission to republish in this connection her 
poem The Town Called After Him. 



PREFACE 

I have written this book because I beheve 
that the story of the American people as it is 
embodied in the history of our United States 
suppHes the most important material for 
character building in the entire field of 
elementary education, and should be offered 
to children in a new, humanitarian way as a 
means of helping them to understand the 
present. 

The plan of the book is to present the 
development of our nation, not as a summary 
of unrelated facts and a confusion of dates, 
but as one of the most vivid panoramas the 
world has ever known, its first scene laid 
on Plymouth Rock and its last the flight of an 
American aviator winging his way over a 
battlefield in Europe. The historical episodes 
that make this panorama are selected and pre- 
sented in such a way as to show boys and girls 
that our present position as a great people 



is the result of following the road of freedom 
we have been building steadily ever since the 
landing of the Pilgrims, and that real de- 
mocracy can be really efficient, not only in 
the case of our own nation, but in our relations 
to the other peoples of the world. 

My method of presenting these historical 
epochs is different from the average story in 
American history in that it makes a direct 
appeal to conduct and to life. 

Each story has a central character from 
history as its hero who played a part, begin- 
ning often with youth, in our development as a 
free country. The children who read the 
stories will feel and understand our history 
as the men who made it did. Through this 
appeal to the imagination, boys and girls of 
today are inspired to follow lines of right 
conduct and to achieve as our ancestors did. 
They are helped to understand the drama of 
present national events in terms of our valiant 
historical past. They feel an urge to be, 
themselves, a part of our history tomorrow. 

The stories embody only those fundamental 
facts and dates which have a direct bearing 
upon our present position as a great, free. 



nation, and some of these facts include the 
stories of far-seeing inventors whose mechani- 
cal achievements not only bettered our own 
industrial organization, but strengthened our 
bonds with the outside world. Each story 
emphasizes the social and ethical features of 
the period it represents; home life, schooling, 
food, agriculture, travel, transportation, typi- 
cal customs, business, discovery, everyday 
work, longing for expansion, and self sacrifice 
are used to create an atmosphere of reality 
about each story, and to make it a record of 
men, rather than of names, battles, and 
statistics. 

Quite as important as this social appeal is 
the appeal that the book makes to children's 
powers of reasoning and judgment. By its 
very definition, history is a study in cause and 
effect; because some individual or group 
dared something the inevitable happened. 
So the Pilgrims dreamed of and won their 
fight for opportunity in the New World. A 
bit of parchment that Governor Winthrop 
refused to give up began our government by 
the people. A New Amsterdam trapper 
following a beaver's trail along the Hudson 



marked our first business street. A king of 
the House of Hanover discovered the stuff 
of which the Enghsh people were made when 
he had to recognize our Independence. An 
American boy experimenting with a paddle 
wheel and fishing boat gave the steamboat to 
commerce and travel, and a wilderness road 
opened for us the development and wealth of 
the west. They were all adventures and 
combine to interpret for children the recent 
great adventure of the American people, the 
finding of a new democracy for ourselves, no 
longer cut off from the world, but one with the 
nations of the Old World in kindness and co- 
operation, pity, unselfishness, help, and love 
of noble things. 

Carolyn Sherwin Bailey, 



Broad Stripes 
and Bright Stars 



BROAD STRIPES 
AND BRIGHT STARS 



PILGRIMS FOR FREEDOM 

From the time when he was a boy on his 
father's great country estate in the north of 
England, Miles Standish had been thrilled 
by the stories he had heard of the New World, 
lying across the Atlantic Ocean from Britain. 
They were adventurous enough tales to thrill 
any boy, especially one with a high spirit and 
great courage pent up in a very small body. 
''Miles in name, but inches in stature,'' was 
what they said of him. 

On the yellowing charts in his father's 
library Miles could have pointed out, the 
voyage across the Atlantic of the Great Sea- 
man, as English seafaring folk still called 
Sebastian Cabot, who had touched the main- 
land of the New World almost a century 
before. 

''Here he started," Miles would say, in- 
dicating an English port on the map. "Then 
he sailed due north, toward the land whose 



12 PILGRIMS FOR FREEDOM 

islands Christopher Columbus discovered. 
He loved the sea more than anything else, 
and he braved fog and chilling winds and huge 
icebergs on this perilous voyage. Three 
months the Great Seaman was gone, and 
when he returned he brought tales of having 
touched the shores of a cold, bleak country 
with fields of ice and snow. Until he died 
Sebastian Cabot talked of the New World 
that he, sailing for England, had touched. 
I would have liked to take passage with him,'' 
Miles would finish. 

An old serving man on the Standish estate 
was able to tell Miles a story of one Christmas 
over three score years before in the New 
World. 

^^England is fair and full of plenty,'' he 
he would say, "but Cortes, the Spanish 
discoverer, found a fairer land. Fancy a city, 
lad, built of gold and silver and set on a wide 
blue lake with floating gardens on its waters! 
There were palaces in this southern kingdom 
in which dark skinned Aztec rulers lived who 
owned mines of precious stones and rich 



PILGRIMS FOR FREEDOM 13 

harvest fields, and were envied by other 
nations/' 

'Then, near Christmas in the year 1520?^' 
Miles would ask. 

'The ambitious Spaniard, Hernando Cortes, 
reached this Aztec city and marched through 
its streets with a band of soldiers, '^ the old 
man continued. 'The Aztecs had a tradition 
that, years before, they had been visited by a 
stranger from the East who had taught them 
all the arts of peace and war and had said 
that he would come again to demand the 
whole of their kingdom. They thought that 
Cortes was this conqueror.'' 

"And so the Spaniard found the southern 
part of the New World," Miles would end the 
story as he looked wistfully across the quiet 
English pastures in the direction of the sea, 
and this land of wonders. 

It was the reign of Queen Elizabeth in 
England, a time of merry feasting and tourna- 
ments, of pageants and velvet cloaks and 
jewels and fine lace. There was every chance 
for Miles Standish, grown to a youth, to sit 
at the feet of the Queen and obtain favor at 



14 PILGRIMS FOR FREEDOM 

the Elizabethan court, being well born and of 
a fiery, spirited kind of courage. But the 
walls of a palace seemed to him as limited as 
prison walls, and the shores of England were 
too narrow for him. He wanted a chance to 
voyage away from them as the Great Seaman 
had done so many years before. Suddenly 
his chance came. Spanish pirates attempted 
to take the Belgian coast town of Ostend, and 
the Hollanders made a stand to hold it against 
them. Queen Elizabeth decided to send 
troops to Flanders to help the Dutch. 

Miles Standish remembered the story that 
had seemed so wonderful to him in his boy- 
hood. Again he saw the conquering Spanish 
explorer marching on the feast day of peace 
to wrest their kingdom from the Aztecs in the 
New World. Here, at a port of the Old World, 
was an expedition of the same ambitious 
Spaniards. Miles Standish went to the Queen 
with a request for service. 

^'You would be a minstrel, a squire, a 
jester?^' the Queen asked, looking down at 
the earnest youth. No wonder she asked it; 
only a scant five feet tall, a round face like a 



PILGRIMS FOR FREEDOM 15 

boy's but with large, dark blue eyes that 
flashed temper and strong determination and 
high courage like darts of lightning, that was 
Miles Standish. His answer proved his 
worth. 

'^I would like a sword, your Majesty." 

A lieutenant at eighteen; that was a good 
beginning! Miles Standish went to Flanders 
and fought like the intrepid soldier he was for 
three years in the long siege of Ostend. The 
town surrendered at last and a truce was 
declared. Miles Standish was now a captain 
and engaged in garrison duty, first in one post 
and then in another, until he was sent at last 
to Ley den in Holland. 

Here, away from his native England, Miles 
Standish heard again tales and rumors of the 
New World. The Hollanders had an odd 
geographical theory about it. 

"That continent on the other side of the 
Atlantic is only a narrow strip of land," they 
said. "It is quite possible that there is a 
strait which leads through it." 

It was a good guess, for no one really knew. 

"If we could sail north of or through this 



16 PILGRIMS FOR FREEDOM 

strange land/^ the Dutch East India trading 
company said, *'how it would shorten our 
route !'^ And with this idea in mind they had 
sent Henry Hudson on a voyage in 1609 to 
try and discover a quicker route to India. 
Miles Standish listened to the reports of Henry 
Hudson's trip. It was almost as exciting as 
Cabot's voyage had been. 

Henry Hudson had sailed in the little Half 
Moon, a cold and stormy western voyage. 
His crew was close to mutiny, and he, himself, 
grew discouraged and heartsick. He en- 
countered icebergs and chilling currents to- 
ward the north so he changed his course south. 
When the Half Moon, battered and with torn 
sails, was about to turn back, she had drifted 
quietly into a beautiful river. Wild roses 
grew so low on the shores that the tired 
seamen could pick them, and there were 
purple grapes and rosy apples and plenty of 
fish. On either side of this river, which they 
named the Hudson, were great green hills. 

Close on these tales came others of an 
English settlement in the New World estab- 
lished by King James the First, who ruled 



PILGRIMS FOR FREEDOM 17 

England now in place of Queen Elizabeth. It 
was called Virginia, because the country was 
so new and so fair. The colonists were having 
struggles with wild savages, it was reported, 
but they had found food and raw materials 
unknown in their home country, and valuable ; 
potatoes and wild turkeys, sassafras root, 
tobacco, great cedar posts and walnut timber, 
and iron ore. 

It was all a part of dreams, and yet true. 

Holland was a tidy, comfortable place in 
which to live. Captain Standish, when he was 
not on duty, walked up and down Leyden^s 
clean, paved streets, saw the gardens bright 
with tulips and watched the trim housewives 
in their bright gowns and wooden shoes gos- 
siping across one carved half door to another. 
All that the little kingdom of Holland asked 
was a chance to tend her gardens and keep 
house in the clean, bright way in which she 
had always done. 

But one day Miles Standish noticed 
strangers in Leyden. A stern, sober English- 
man in a long black cloak and tall hat hurried 
by. With him was a young girl, who might 



18 PILGRIMS I OR FREEDOM 

have been his daughter, her fair curls tucked 
smoothly into a tight muslin cap and a muslin 
kerchief folded demurely over the shoulders 
of her straight gray frock. 

^Tilgrims/' a friend told Captain Standish 
later. ^Xeyden is full of them. They left 
England because thej^ want to be free to 
build their own church. They will not be held 
by the laws of the Church of England. Now 
they find that they are not free in Holland, 
either. They are restless and chafe under 
the peace and quiet here. Their children 
are growing up to speak the Dutch tongue and 
to forget English customs. These Pilgrims 
are rightly named, Captain; they have no 
abiding place. They are planning even,'' 
the man lowered his voice at the hazard of the 
scheme, ^^to make a voyage to the New 
World!'' 

Captain Standish listened and then made 
a sudden decision. Here was a great op- 
portunity for him and for England, he 
believed. The spirit of all the valiant ex- 
plorers who had gone before suddenly filled 
his heart. He fancied himself the Great 



PILGRIMS FOR FREEDOM 19 

Seaman, bailing an uncharted ocean to find 
a new land. He was the soldier who would 
wrest that fair Aztec kingdom from the 
oppression of Spain. He saw the green hills 
that bordered the Hudson River, and he 
could feel and touch the fruits and crops of 
Virginia. Here, in Leyden, were his followers, 
Enghsh folk like himself, and bound on the 
same pilgrimage as that of which he had 
dreamed. 

''I will lead the Pilgrims to the New World," 
he said. 

''But you are not of their belief; you are of 
the Church of England, '' his friend protested. 

'That makes no difference at all," Miles 
Standish said. "They are pilgrims for free- 
dom. This matter of building a church is the 
way the dream came to them." 

And this proved to be true, for the Pilgrims 
accepted the leadership of Captain Miles 
Standish. They put themselves under his 
guidance for the perilous adventure upon 
which they at once embarked. 

An ocean liner of today slips away from her 
dock with scarcely a throb of her engines. One 



20 PILGRIMS FOR FREEDOM 

lives aboard her for the days of the trip across 
the Atlantic Ocean much as one lives in a 
hotel in a great city; there are the same 
comfortable beds and baths, a great dining 
room, a library, musicians, and servants. 
One scarcely feels the waves, and a storm is 
safely weathered. 

There were no ocean liners in the seven- 
teenth century. Miles Standish and the 
Pilgrims boarded a small sailing vessel, the 
Speedwell, and crossed to England where they 
were joined by another sailing vessel, only 
slightly larger, the Mayflower. She was 
crowded with other wayfarers who wanted to 
begin living anew in a new land. It was in 
August of the year 1620 that the two little 
ships started on their three thousand mile 
trip. 

They had gone out a short distance only 
when water began to pour into the hold of the 
Speedwell and she barely returned to port 
without sinking. They stopped the leak and 
set sail again, but three hundred miles from 
land the vessel began to take water again. 
Then Captain Standish discovered that the 



PILGRIMS FOR FREEDOM 21 

Speedwell's captain was a coward, afraid to 
go on with the hazardous voyage, and he had 
disabled the ship. The Pilgrims abandoned 
the Speedwell and crowded into the May- 
flower. There were over a hundred men, 
women and children. She was loaded with 
guns, and tools for farming and building, 
kettles, spinning wheels, crude furniture and 
kitchen utensils, only the needful things for 
beginning a new life, but they freighted the 
little bark so heavily that her deck almost 
touched the level of the sea. There was no 
refuge from storms as the sea washed over the 
deck, and the wind bent the frail masts and 
tossed the Mayflower like a boat sailed by a 
child in play. 

Stout hearts and brave hands filled the 
Mayflower, though. The men bailed out the 
leaking holds and mended broken spars and 
never once gave up the ship for lost, even 
when she was blown about like a chip in the 
waters of a strange ocean. The women would 
have scorned to speak of their fears and the 
children did not murmur. Miles Standish was 
pilot and comforter and captain of hope all in 



22 PILGRIMS FOR FREEDOM 

one. He seemed a giant in stature, so great 
was his courage. Each one of the cold, bleak 
days of the two months that the Mayflower 
took her trackless way to the New World, 
Captain Standish had the same message of 
cheer for the Pilgrims. 

^'We are one day nearer our port. Some 
morning we will see the plentiful fields of 
Virginia." 

But when land was first sighted from the 
Mayflower in November of the same year, 
1620, it was a bleak, rocky coast. Bare oak 
trees and pointed pines made impenetrable 
forests. There was nothing growing; there 
were no shelters waiting for the Pilgrims, 
and it was almost winter. They had drifted 
in a northerly direction and had sighted 
the point of land that is now Cape Cod, 

Captain Standish and a few men made a 
difficult landing and cut trails through the 
woods to try and locate a spot for a settle- 
ment. Sometimes they lost their way in the 
forests; very often an arrow, shot from an 
Indian's bow, would whiz past them. At last, 
late in December, they found a little open bay 



PILGRIMS FOR FREEDOM 23 

beyond which lay wooded hills and streams. 
It showed traces of English explorers and 
Captain John Smith, in charge of an English 
expedition to Virginia, had marked it Ply- 
mouth. 

Wading through icy water, carrying their 
children and their few utensils through the 
surf, the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth on 
December 21st, 1620. They stood with Miles 
Standish, a gallant little group, their feet on a 
bare rock, but their eyes fixed on the stars. 
The New World, America, was very different 
from the fair land of which they had dreamed, 
but it held everything for which they had 
dared the voyage, a chance to start at the 
very beginning of things, and to start free. 



THE FIRST FIGHT 

The Indian, Squanto, crept with silent foot- 
steps through the wintry woods of Plymouth 
and peered in the window of the log building 
at the foot of the hill. News of the arrival of 
the Pilgrims with their fearless captain, Miles 
Standish, had been brought to the nearby 
tribe by Indian scouts. The tribe had 
watched their landing, the cutting of logs for 
this single large house that sheltered the 
Pilgrims and their tools and stores, the placing 
of cannon on the hilltop and the enclosing of 
the settlement by a tall stockade. They had 
seen the women washing the clothes in the 
water of some chilly stream, they had watched 
this doughty leader of the pale faces. Captain 
Standish, helping to make soup in a large iron 
pot, tending the sick, and even digging graves 
during those first hard months in the New 
World. Whatever came to his hand, he did as 



THE FIRST FIGHT 25 

well as he had fought in Flanders and guided 
the Pilgrims to the shores of Plymouth. 

It was so with the others of this little com- 
pany of strangers in the redman's land. 
Although an occasional glimpse of a painted 
face looking over the stockade, a swift dart 
shot from an Indian bow in the forest, or the 
echo of a savage yell terrified them, they went 
on hunting and staking off plots for gardens 
and houses, and cutting logs and stalking 
game in a fearless way that interested the 
tribes. The Indians were as much a part of 
America as were the pine trees and the deer. 
It was their land on which the Pilgrims were 
settling and the savages could have sur- 
rounded them and killed them at any time 
that they chose. Instead, they were watching 
their new neighbors and waiting. 

As he knelt, unseen, by the window the 
Indian runner touched the rough logs of 
which this first house in Plymouth was built. 
The wigwam to which he would return was 
constructed of several long saplings, stuck in 
the ground in a circle and covered over with 
thickly braided rush mats. A round hole at 



26 THE FIRST FIGHT 

the top made the chimney and another hole 
at the bottom was the door. It was a satis- 
factory enough shelter but not nearly so well 
built and lasting as the one beneath whose 
wall Squanto was crouching. The crevices 
between the logs were plastered with clay 
mortar. The roof was strongly thatched. The 
large chimney was made of stout sticks laid 
crosswise, one upon another, and well 
plastered with clay inside and out. These 
strangers had greater skill, different tools and 
more deadly weapons than their Indian 
neighbors, Squanto realized, but the scene 
inside the cabin was what amazed the Indian. 
The diminished group of men and women 
and children huddled about a small fire. Their 
number was less than half of those who had 
landed with such hope from the Mayflower at 
the beginning of the winter of 1620. They 
had pinched, white faces. Remembering his 
own lodge hung with dried venison and fish, 
and stored with grains and dried berries in 
preparation for this long, white winter, the 
Indian understood the significance of what he 
saw. The Pilgrims were about to lose their 



THE FIRST FIGHT 27 

fight with hunger. In spite of their bold 
courage and the different skill with which 
they used their hands, the pale faces were 
conquered — unless. 

Squanto rose noiselessly. He hurried away 
through the forest as quietly as a red leaf 
drifts, blown by the wind. He traveled very 
swiftly, for he was bearing news to his tribe 
and he did not stop until he saw the smoke 
rising from wigwams and was met by other 
runners who conducted him to the lodge of 
his great chief, Massasoit. Gathered about 
a council fire the tribe and their chief discussed 
the matter of the settlement at Plymouth, the 
glow of the flames lighting their painted faces 
and glistening war axes. Should they kill 
or make friends with these white strangers? 
At last Massasoit rose and led the way to a 
mound of earth just outside the limits of the 
camp. There were many of these mounds, 
some of them holding implements of warfare, 
another concealing a collection of tools that 
they had stolen from the Pilgrims but did not 
know how to use. These were Indian treasure 
mounds. Massasoit solemnly opened one and 



28 THE FIRST FIGHT 

lifted out some heavy baskets filled with small 
kernels of grain, yellow, and red and black. 
He took a few in his hand and fingered them 
as if they were gold coins. They were indeed 
more precious than money, for they were 
kernels of Indian corn and each one held in its 
heart the power to win the battle the Pilgrims 
were fighting against starvation. Massasoit 
lifted out a basket of corn and returned with 
it to his lodge. He had made his decision in 
regard to his pale face neighbors. 

March, chill and blustering, found the 
Pilgrims in desperate circumstances. There 
were a few log houses in Plymouth with land 
for gardens laid out for the largest families. 
Each head of a family built his own house, 
since by this plan every one did his best. 
But the food supplies they had brought in the 
Mayflower were exhausted; they were in too 
great danger from unfriendly Indians now to 
go for long hunting expeditions, and they did 
not understand the agricultural conditions of 
North America or how to get the most in the 
way of crops out of the land. Even dauntless 



THE FIRST FIGHT 29 

Miles Standish had almost lost heart; it 
seemed an uneven fight. 

We think of the settlers of Plymouth in 
these early days as the pictures show them to 
us, dressed in the black cloaks and stiffly 
starched linen and buckle trimmed shoes they 
had worn in England. But the spring of 1621 
saw them a ragged, unkempt, starved colony of 
nomad English folk whose sole wealth was 
their courage and the strong belief that out 
of their desire for freedom would come their 
power to attain food and shelter and clothing. 

Then, in the same month of March, the 
Pilgrims were startled one day by an un- 
expected vision. 

Two Indian runners, Squanto and his 
friend, Samoset, appeared in their midst. 
Copper skinned, half naked, straight as 
arrows, these two, who were able to speak a 
little English, explained that the mighty chief 
of the Iroquois tribe, Massasoit himself, was 
on his way with a company of warriors to pay 
the white men a visit. Before the Pilgrims 
had time to take council together as to what 
they should do in this new emergency, Massa- 



30 THE FIRST FIGHT 

soit was seen with his train ascending the hill 
back of Plymouth. On the brow they stopped, 
waiting for a hostage. They had made them- 
selves ready for the visit with great care; 
their faces were painted across with wide 
streaks of black and white or black and red, 
and some had braided foxes^ tails into their 
long, snake like hair. Each Indian was fully 
armed with bow and arrows and battle axe. 

The giving and taking of hostages was an 
old custom of the nations, the Pilgrims 
realized, and Edward Winslow, a Pilgrim 
leader, was chosen to go up the hill to Massa- 
soit, wearing his polished armor and sword 
and carrying some knives and a copper chain 
as gifts. Winslow^s courage was great, for 
Massasoit's train numbered scores of picked 
warriors, but as he stood before them fear- 
lessly the Indians stacked their weapons and 
followed him down the hill into Plymouth. 

Captain Standish and his men met the 
company and fired a salute. Miles Standish 
had never forgotten for a moment the story 
he had heard in his boyhood of Cortes' treat- 
ment of the Aztecs. He had heard tales, also, 



THE FIRST FIGHT 31 

of the trouble the Enghsh colonists were 
having now in Virginia with the Indians; 
there was continual warfare and slight basis 
for permanent friendship between the settlers 
of Jamestown and their red-skin neighbors. 
He had faith in fair dealing and neighborliness 
in the relation between the two races, at least 
until the Indians showed signs of direct 
hostility. Here were red men, come on a 
friendly visit to Plymouth, so the military 
salute was given to welcome them and then 
Massasoit and his warriors were conducted 
to the central house in the village of Plymouth 
and invited to seat themselves on cushions 
as a feast prepared from the scanty food 
stores was offered them. 

Then followed the framing of the first 
treaty between the white men and the red. 
Those of the Indians who could speak English 
learned it by heart and interpreted and taught 
it to the others. It was an excellent peace 
compact for civilized and savage nations. 

The Pilgrims and the Indians, to begin with, 
agreed to do each other no hurt. But if an 



32 THE FIRST FIGHT 



Indian should hurt a white man, he was to be 
referred to the Enghsh for trial. If an Indian 
should rob the English, or an Englishman an 
Indian, each one agreed to see that the prop- 
erty was returned to the owner. Each 
promised to be the other's ally in case of war 
and that they would visit each other unarmed. 
Massasoit agreed to send runners with the 
words of the treaty to all his neighboring 
tribes. The great chief rose to leave, as mas- 
sive and powerful as some forest oak arrayed 
in its fall colors of red and brown. His war- 
riors followed him, for their business was over, 
and they knew that their chief would never 
break his word as long as he lived. 

The great day of the first treaty making 
in Plymouth was not quite finished, though. 
As Massasoit and his train of warriors went 
back over the hill, Squanto lingered in the 
stockade. He took a basket from under his 
cloak of deer skin and showed it to the wonder- 
ing Pilgrims. It was full of those same strange 
seeds, yellow and red and black. He offered 
it to Captain Standish; explaining that each 



THE FIRST FIGHT 33 

kernel of corn held the secret of victory over 
the Pilgrim's greatest enemy, starvation. 

Squanto was more than a savage. He was a 
successful Indian farmer. '^He could be quite 
as cruel as any of the rest of his tribe but he 
knew more about the soil and crops of Ply- 
mouth than the Pilgrims did, and he liked to 
plant and harvest. He felt quite rich with the 
white men's occasional gifts of colored beads, 
a jack knife, a pair of shoes and a hat. In 
return, he taught them his methods of getting 
the most out of the soil. The white men must 
plant the kernels of corn in hills at about the 
time in spring when the new leaves on the 
oak trees were the size of a field mouse's ear, 
he told them. A fish buried in the earth of 
each hill of corn was good fertilizer for the 
corn ; the seed would sprout faster. Pumpkin 
seed could be planted in the same field as corn 
and the pumpkins would prove excellent food. 
In the meantime, to satisfy hunger while this 
first crop was in the ground, there was plenty 
of fish to be had. An Indian canoe was fight 
and small enough to skim over almost any 
waters for trout and salmon, and eels could 



34 THE FIRST FIGHT 

be had by treading them out of the mud with 
ones bare feet. Such food made a feast if 
properly cooked. All this food knowledge 
was Squanto's and he taught it to the settlers 
of Plymouth. 

Europe had known nothing of Indian corn. 
The Pilgrims' courage was high as they 
ploughed and planted, and saw green shoots 
pushing their way up through the earth, and 
listened to Squanto's instructions about grind- 
ing the corn into meal, and cooking it in a 
kettle, or moulding it into cakes. The Spring 
grew warmer and changed to summer. Then 
it was the harvest time of the year, and the 
little log houses of Plymouth sunned them- 
selves complacently, surrounded by fields of 
rich grain and gardens of vegetables. 

Everybody helped his neighbor in harvest- 
ing these first, most precious crops of Ply- 
mouth. There was reaping and binding and 
grinding to be done. The sound of a drum 
called all the able bodied Pilgrims to the fields 
every morning, and Captain Standish and the 
governor of Plymouth, WiUiam Bradford, 
led the laborers and did their honest share 



THE FIRST FIGHT 35 

of the work. There were wild geese and 
turkeys, water fowl, deer and partridges to 
be had for meat, and cornmeal was found just 
as palatable and nourishing as Squanto had 
said it would be. In November of 1621 the 
Pilgrims decided to spread a common feast 
in celebration of this first epoch making year 
just ended in the New World. 

Now that flour and meat were at hand the 
English housewives had a chance to try their 
skill in making pies and puddings. There 
were quite a few sober, grave eyed boys and 
girls in Plymouth whose faces turned to 
smiles as they saw a long table set with pewter 
plates and flanked by rush seated chairs. 
It was to be their first harvest home; the 
whole brave family of Plymouth was going to 
break bread at one table. These children had 
their share in the preparation for the feast. 
They had known what it was to feel cold and 
hunger, to have no happiness through play, 
and to lose their fathers and mothers even. 
That was all out of mind for a season, though, 
as they gathered nuts and brought in fire- 



36 THE FIRST FIGHT 

wood and piled baskets with apples in readi- 
ness for the feast. 

Suddenly, almost on the eve of the Pil- 
grims' harvest feast, they had another sur- 
prise. The great chief, Massasoit, with his 
warriors came again to Plymouth. News of 
the harvest celebration had reached him and 
he had come to take part in it. 

The Indians were obliged to set up their 
camp out of doors, for there were only a scant 
dozen houses in Plymouth, but with Massa- 
soit came also Indian summer, warm and soft, 
and bright with sunshine. His most skilled 
hunters were sent out to the forest to bring 
in more game, and the Pilgrims built addi- 
tional tables under the trees, spread with 
baked clams, broiled fish, roasted turkey and 
their own harvest of corn, vegetables and fruit. 

Then they seated themselves, red men and 
white, at our first Thanksgiving feast. 

It was also our first peace table. These 
wandering Pilgrims for freedom had found 
that the necessities of life are not won without 
a struggle, but they were victors in their first 
fight. They had made the earth supply them 




They seated themselves, redmen and white, at our 
first Thanksgiving table. 



THE FIRST FIGHT 37 

with food. They had built themselves homes. 
They had also made allies of the Indians 
through neighborliness and mutual helpful- 
ness. It was a very good foundation which 
the Pilgrims had laid for building their strong- 
hold of hope, a new England. 



THE FREEHANDS CHARTER 

Stephen Winthrop was puzzled, but he did 
not speak of his wonder even to his younger 
brother, Adam. Perhaps Adam would not 
understand him, Stephen thought, but he was 
a lad of twelve when the two boys made the 
hazardous trip with their father from England 
and he could remember the slightest detail 
of it. Adam was three years younger than 
Stephen and had just as much love in his 
heart for their father, Governor John Win- 
throp of Massachusetts, as Stephen had. 
But Stephen realized that his father was a 
very great man in the Massachusetts colony. 
Stephen was proud of this but he wondered 
how it had come about. He longed to know 
the secret of his father's power in the New 
World city of Boston in which they lived. 

Stephen remembered England just before 
his father and he and Adam and the little 



THE FREEMAN'S CHARTER 39 

company of Puritans had set out in the sailing 
ship, Arabella, for their seventy six days 
voyage across the Atlantic. There was a new 
king in England, Charles the First, who 
seemed to have lost sight of what true king- 
ship means. His throne and his crown were 
to Charles the First symbols of autocracy, 
not of a just rule. He invaded the rights of 
the English people; he broke his word to his 
subjects. 

Stephen could see in imagination the 
knights and gallants of the court of the king, 
dressed in velvet, fine linen and lace ruffs, 
carrying jeweled swords and looking with 
scorn on such plainly garbed people as John 
Winthrop and his Puritan friends who walked 
London's streets with more heart for the 
persecuted than did these Cavaliers. But 
there was much talk now of the new England, 
lying on the other side of the ocean, a land of 
corn and apples and yet undiscovered wealth 
and, greatest of all, freedom. 

That was why John Winthrop had sold his 
beautiful estate in England and become poor 
for liberty's sake as he helped to equip the 



40 THE FREEMAN'S CHARTER 

Puritan's expedition and set sail from Cowes 
in the spring of the year 1630. Stephen and 
Adam Winthrop of twelve and nine had come 
then, and their mother would follow with the 
other children when there was a home ready 
for her. It had been a colossal task to pre- 
pare a home, to even keep alive to do it. This 
Puritan lad who had helped his father found 
the city of Boston knew that. 

At Salem, the little fishing settlement on the 
coast of Massachusetts to which their ship 
drifted first, the Indians and fisherman had 
fed the Puritans with venison and wild straw- 
berries but this was at a sacrifice, for they had 
scant store for themselves. Then the company 
had sailed farther along the coast, landed and 
set up tents and log shelters at what is now 
Charlestown. The Winthrop boys and the 
other of the Puritan's sons and daughters who 
survived, cut firewood and picked blueberries 
and dug mussels and clams for food. When 
the corn they bought from the Indians gave 
out, the women ground acorns into flour and 
used this for bread. 

It was different indeed for Stephen from 



THE FREEMAN'S CHARTER 41 



his days of drinking cream and eating roasted 
fowls and rich pastries in their great stone 
castle in England. But he saw his father 
tending the sick and sharing their last baking 
of bread with a needy neighbor. John Win- 
throp was farmer and physician and builder 
and governor all in one that first season in 
Massachusetts. Stephen was daily more 
proud of his father and tried to be like him, 
but he wanted to know why John Winthrop 
had been made governor. He was not at all 
like the men in power who they had just left 
in England. But a Puritan lad of those days 
was silent and thoughtful and had so great a 
respect for his parents that he hesitated to 
ask what might seem to them unreasonable 
questions. 

In the fall of the same year, John Winthrop 
had seen a light shining on Beacon Hilf, 
across the river from Charlestown. Then an 
invitation came from the hermit who lived 
alone with his books on Beacon Hill for the 
Puritans to join him. WiUiam Blackstone 
was the hermit's name, and he could offer 
Governor Winthrop a garden, a spring and an 



42 THE FREEMAN'S CHARTER 

orchard! Stephen had helped load the half 
j&nished framework of their house on a boat 
to take it across. He and Adam and his 
father wfent with the precious boards that 
were going to build walls and a roof for their 
mother, but Stephen noticed that Governor 
Winthrop carried a bit of parchment securely 
wrapped and tied and hidden underneath 
his cloak. He was as jealous of this parchment 
and guarded it as carefully as he did the boat^s 
cargo of wood and food. He had guarded it, 
also, on the way from England. Stephen 
wondered if the secret of his father's power 
in New England might not be written on this 
parchment scroll. 

The Winthrop's small frame house was set 
up and presently Stephen could look out of 
one of the oiled paper windows, down the 
green lane that led to the water side and to- 
ward the market place. His mother had come. 
The whir of Mistress Winthrop's spinning 
wheel could be heard in the kitchen and there 
was quite a company of English folk and 
Indians to be seen on their way to market. 
It was now the year 1631. More ships bear- 



THE FREEMAN'S CHARTER 43 

ing more Puritans had reached Massachusetts 
Bay. The town of Boston was founded, 
facing the great water way of the Atlantic 
Ocean and with unbounded land back of it 
for exploring, settling and planting. The 
town had a harbor for shipping and space 
for growth such as had been only dreamed of 
in England. The achievement of building 
Boston had been worth that first winter of 
digging clams and gathering acorns. 

The everyday business of the town was of 
unfailing interest to Stephen and his friends, 
the Puritan lads of the time. He saw only 
scattering, one story buildings and country 
paths from his windows but the workers of a 
prosperous community were there. Carpen- 
ters, masons, stone-cutters, joiners, black- 
smiths, cobblers and all kinds of artisans had 
voyaged across to Boston. The men were 
hunting, fishing, digging, planting and reaping 
to fill hungry mouths, and the women were 
spinning and weaving and stitching their 
cloth into garments. The Indians were 
friendly and brought corn and vegetables and 
skins to Boston by forest trails or in their 



44 THE FREEMAN'S CHARTER 

canoes. There was not as great danger from 
wild beasts as there had been a year before. 
The men of Boston had built a wall, guarded 
by an officer and six men with muskets to 
keep out the wolves. There was also a sentry 
posted on Beacon Hill. A tall, stout mast 
with an arm on the top that held a kettle 
of tar, had been set up to be lighted as a 
signal if wolves or hostile Indians should be 
sighted. 

Boston was safe and busy and happy and 
honorable. Most of all was it proud of 
Stephen's father, the Governor and organizer 
of the Massachusetts Bay settlement. The 
Indians gave the town little trouble; if there 
were differences with the colonists, John 
Winthrop settled them. He was planning a 
forty mile tramp south through the New 
England wilderness to Plymouth to strengthen 
the friendship between the Pilgrims and the 
Puritans. He led the town meetings wisely. 
He worked in his garden and helped with the 
town's building and practised the same thrift 
that he asked of his people. Boston folk were 
free, but they looked to Governor Winthrop 



THE FREEMAN'S CHARTER 45 



for leadership and counsel. Whenever he 
walked through the lanes of Boston in his 
long dark cloak, stiff ruff and stout boots, he 
was followed and surrounded by the towns- 
folk, glad to see him, and eager for his advice 

and help. 

Stephen Winthrop stood up very straight 
as he thought of the place of honor in New 
England his father occupied. Then he left 
the window and crossed the sanded floor to- 
ward the low doorway. It was Tuesday, 
market day, and he thought that he would 
go down to the square and look on for a while 
at the trading. There would be baskets of 
green beans and peas, red apples, sacks of 
yellow corn, strings of fish and possibly some 
wild turkeys to be seen. Indians in gay 
blankets would mingle with the Puritan 
housewives in their straight gray gowns. The 
Indians might have colored shells and beads to 
sell. The Boston market was always an m- 
teresting place. 

At the door, though, Stephen stopped. 
John Winthrop sat at a table at one end of the 
room, his quill pen, ink stone and a sheet of 



46 THE FREEMAN'S CHARTER 

unwritten paper in front of him. He held an 
opened letter in his hand that had come from 
England by the last sailing vessel which had 
docked at Boston Harbor. Stephen saw, to 
his amazement, that it bore the stamp of the 
English crown. 

Governor Winthrop read and then reread 
the letter, his face growing, first, troubled and 
then stern. At last he laid the king's message 
on the table and unlocked a strong box that 
stood at his side. He took out the bit of 
parchment and, unrolling it, spread it out, 
and looked at its writing long and carefully. 
Then he wrote, sprinkled his writing with sand 
and folded it, addressing his message to King 
Charles the First of England. 

Stephen Winthrop could wait no longer. 
He was a young Puritan and he had a great 
desire to understand this older Puritan who 
was helping to build a republic from the city 
of Beacon Hill. 

'Tell me about the bit of parchment that 
you brought from England, Sir,'' the lad 
begged. '^Does it make you the King of 
Boston?" 



THE FREEMAN'S CHARTER 47 

Governor Winthrop put his hand on the 
boy^s shoulder and smiled. '^No, not a king 
in New England/' he said, ^^only the leader 
and guide of a free people who are kings in 
their own right if so be it they conduct them- 
selves righteously/' He pointed to the words 
on the parchment. ^^The charter of the 
Massachusetts Bay Colony/' he explained, 
^^given to me as governor of Massachusetts 
by his majesty, King Charles the First of 
England. It grants me as governor, ap- 
pointed by the king, the power to execute 
the wishes of the people as expressed in the 
laws they make. We, of New England, are 
given the rights of natural born freemen. We 
can make our own laws, correct, pardon, 
cultivate the land, and trade as freemen. 
When my term as governor is over, another 
leader of Massachusetts will be chosen in my 
place by all the people." 

^'And King Charles wishes to revoke the 
charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 
sir?" Stephen asked, guessing what the letter 
from the crown was about. 

'^He was in a strangely good humor when 



48 THE FREEMAN'S CHARTER 

he granted it/^ Governor Winthrop answered. 
*^He thought, mayhap, that our expedition 
would fail, that we would not be able to bring 
the high courage of old England with us, 
here, to New England. Yes, lad, the king has 
sent for our charter but I have written that 
we can not give it up/' 

Stephen had discovered the secret of the 
greatness by means of which his father was 
safeguarding freedom in Massachusetts, his 
treasuring of this bit of parchment that made 
every man free in his own right if only he had 
the quahties of a free man. Stephen Winthrop 
was to grow to young manhood and see his 
father elected governor for twelve of the nine- 
teen years that he lived in the colony. Again 
and again the charter was demanded by the 
throne of England, but civil war arose, and 
Governor Winthrop was able to hold the 
charter by his great tact and wisdom. 

Stephen and his father sat together until 
the town was quiet after the pleasant hub-bub 
of market day, the sun had set and candles 
began to twinkle through the windows of 
other houses, There were no lamps along 



THE FREEMAN'S CHARTER 49 

the streets or light houses for the rocky shore 
on which the surf beat and tumbled. Occa- 
sionally the far away cry of a wolf could be 
heard, or the shrill call of an Indian in the 
nearby woods. Suddenly, the two heard a 
sound of footsteps in the narrow byways of 
the town. Up one lane and down another 
they went and at each lonely house a 
watchman of New England called, '^AlFs 
Well!'' 

It was well, so far, for our liberty. Explorer, 
Pilgrim and Puritan had found a new land 
and settled in it. They had conquered man's 
first enemy, hunger, and had made a begin- 
ning of neighborliness with the Indians. Now 
the great step of government by the people 
had been taken, a milestone along the road 
on which democracy was building. 



FOLLOWING THE BEAVER^S TRAIL 

Tuenis Jansen, of Amersfoort in Holland, 
laid his hand on the big brass knocker of the 
house in New Amsterdam, America, where he 
was to live. The knocker was in the shape 
of a dog's head, made of solid brass and 
polished until it shone like gold. Tuenis 
lifted it curiously and was of a mind to let it 
fall with a clang, calling the good Dutch 
housewife from her kitchen to welcome him, 
a lad of eighteen who had just arrived at 
Manhattan Island on a sailing ship, the 
Gilded Beaver. Then he hesitated a second, 
looking about him at the strange sights in this 
busy, thriving town of the New World. 

For a long time Tuenis had wanted to see 
New Amsterdam in America. He felt that he 
belonged there in a way, because his grand- 
father had sailed up the Hudson River in the 
Half Moon with the explorer, Henry Hudson, 
fifty years before. He had come again and 



FOLLOWING THE BEAVER'S TRAIL 51 

again to the log warehouse that the traders 
had built on the Island of Manhattan to buy 
beaver's pelts from the Indians and sell them 
again on the other side of the ocean. 

Tuenis' father, also, had told the lad 
stories of what had happened on this island at 
the mouth of the Hudson River after his 
grandfather had died. The Hollanders had 
bought the entire Island of Manhattan in 1626 
from the Indians for what the red men con- 
sidered a just price, twenty four dollars worth 
of brass buttons, bright red cloth, large glass 
beads of all the colors in the rainbow and 
some ribbons. Several log houses, each one 
built by the head of a family, clustered about 
the storehouse soon, and wind mills for grind- 
ing grain began to turn their white sails in 
the sunshine. 

Then trading began. The red men brought 
beaver and fox and bear and cony and even 
occasional seal skins in their canoes or by 
trail to the fort on Manhattan Island where 
the Dutch traders paid them, with the utmost 
honesty, whatever they asked for these furs. 
Usually it was a question of paying in bright 



52 FOLLOWING THE BEAVER'S TRAIL . 

jack knives, little polished hand mirrors or 
Indian money made out of clam shells and 
strung on threads of sinew or fastened to 
deerskin belts. These had value in the 
Indians' eyes. Tuenis' father had said that 
this was an excellent arrangement, for it kept 
peace with the Indians and brought prosperity 
to the colonists. Tuenis had heard these tales 
from the sailors as they sat on the edge of the 
canal at home. He had not been able to stay 
away from New Amsterdam, and here he was, 
having worked his passage in a sailing packet, 
and really arrived, in 1657. 

The house before whose quaint half door 
he stood was not built of logs but of wood and 
stone, and the ends were a kind of patch work 
of black and yellow Dutch bricks. Over the 
half opened door Tuenis could see a well 
scrubbed and sanded floor, a huge fireplace 
with platters of wood and pewter ranged 
in long rows in the plate racks above it, and 
a noisy old clock with a moon face ticking 
busily in the corner. There was a pleasant 
odor of frying crullers. It might have been 
his own home in Holland, Tuenis thought. 



FOLLOWING THE BEAVER'S TRAIL 53 

and here he was thousands of miles away in 
the New World. 

A sound of tapping heels along the nar- 
row, cobble paved street came to the lad, and 
he turned to see who might be passing. He 
had come up a green path from the wharf and 
had passed the stone fort with its mounted 
guns and quite a settlement of these low, 
gabled houses. Here were the men and women 
of New Amsterdam, looking as if they had 
just stepped off the pleasant banks of the 
Zuyder Zee. 

A housemother passed in a bright linsey- 
woolsey gown, a gay little cap of quilted calico 
on her head and wearing red worsted stock- 
ings and shoes with silver buckles. She wore 
a velvet girdle and hung from it by chains of 
silver were the keys of her pantry, her scissors 
and her pincushion. Behind her came a 
Dutch trader in cloth breeches, silver buttons 
on his coat and wearing a high wide brimmed 
hat of beaver worth many guilders. He was 
smoking a long stemmed pipe and looking at 
the bill of lading for his last cargo to Europe. 
There were children, too, running by and 



64 FOLLOWING T HE BEAVER'S TRAIL 

kitchen gardens could be seen just across the 
street. Tuenis was so fascinated by this New- 
World settlement that he still lingered on the 
doorstep. Just as he was about to drop the 
knocker, he heard another sound that stopped 
him. 

Tap J tap, tap, it came nearer. 

'^Old Silver Legs, by my word!" the lad 
exclaimed. Then he slipped farther into the 
shadow of the doorway as a soldier in a velvet 
cloak, lace collar and plumed hat, and with a 
wooden leg bound with silver bands tramped 
by. 

^ ^Governor Peter Stuyvesant of New Amster- 
dam, peppery, strong willed, of a very bad 
temper, but brave and honest," Tuenis 
thought, remembering the tales he had heard 
of this fiery leader. And the lad was right. 

When Peter Stuyvesant's rule of energy and 
terror was over and he was obliged to sur- 
render New Amsterdam to England in 1664 
and see the Dutch flag lowered he did not 
retire to the shelter of Holland. Instead, he 
settled down as a farmer in New York and 
made friends with the new governor and 




Why, Tuenis Jansen ! Welcome to New 
Amsterdam !" 



FOLLOWING THE BEAVER'S TRAIL 55 

showed what a good loser an old soldier with 
a wooden leg could be. 

'^Why, Tuenis Jansen! Welcome to New 
Amsterdam/' A pair of laughing blue eyes 
and two rosy cheeks framed in a white cap 
faced the lad across the door. '^Come in! 
Mother and father were expecting you by the 
Golden Beaver and there is a sleeping bench 
for you under the eaves, and I have laid a 
place for you at the table." Tuenis smiled 
back at the girl, a few years younger than he, 
who opened the door for him. It was Grietje 
Yerrenton, who he had known as a neighbor 
in Holland. Her father had been his father's 
friend and companion in their earher days of 
exploring and trapping along the Hudson. 

^ ^Greetings, Grietje," Tuenis replied going 
into the comfortable, plain little room. ^^I 
am glad to be here in New Amsterdam." 

Food and lodging must be paid for in this 
busy little town, Tuenis soon found. His 
host, Mynheer Yerrenton, spoke of this the 
next day. 

^We need ships and still more ships, lad," 
he said. ^'If I am not mistaken, you were 



56 FOLLOWING THE BEAVER'S TRAIL 

apprenticed to a carpenter in Amersfoort and 
your trade will stand us in good stead here. 
I will find you work in the shipyard today/' 

So Tuenis put on a leather apron and 
changed his buckled shoes for wooden ones and 
went to work. He liked it, for every one was 
working for the prosperity and growth of this 
trading station on Manhattan Island. Wood 
cutters were busy in the surrounding forests 
cutting timber for shaping hulls, beams, posts 
and spars for a ship that was to stand eight 
or twelve hundred tons of cargo. Other timber 
was being cut and drawn for building a saw- 
mill and a gristmill. ^ Some enterprising 
Dutchmen had begun making clay bricks, 
extracting potash from wood ashes, and salt 
from the sea water. Oyster shells were being 
collected for the lime they contained. These 
products, beyond what was needed for the 
town and the farms that were spreading north, 
along the Hudson River, were to be used for 
trade. Every one seemed to have a great 
desire to build business. 

As he stood high upon a platform in the 
shipyard; shaping a hull, and could see on one 



FOLLOWING THE BEAVER'S TRAIL 57 

side of him the boundless waters of the harbor 
and on the other the green trail through the 
forest that took its way as far as the northern 
fort at Albany, Tuenis sometimes wondered 
how the comfort and prosperity in which he 
lived had come. The Island of Manhattan 
was surrounded by a wilderness still; it was 
not so long ago that it had been a wilderness 
itself. 

'^I can tell you," Grietje Yerrenton said 
laughingly to Tuenis that night as the two 
sat beside the fire, and the lad had said 
wonderingly, '^What makes New Amsterdam 
so thriving? '^ 

^We^re safe from the little Dutch goblin," 
Grietje went on, lowering her voice mysteri- 
ously. '^He hasn't found us yet." 

"The goblin?" Tuenis queried. 

"Yes," Grietje shook her yellow braids 
decisively. "He lives on the top of the great 
Dunderberg mountain up the Hudson River 
near the Highlands. He wears a hat shaped 
like one of our sugar loaves, and he has very 
great power. If he should take it into his 
head to come down to New Amsterdam, or 



58 FOLLOWING THE BEAVER'S TRAIL 

if the wind should blow even his hat through 
our lanes, our luck would go.'' 

^'Oh, Grietje, where is your common sense?'' 
Tuenis laughed and the girl laughed too. 
Then they were silent, each thinking. Could 
it be that some mysterious influence made the 
sun shine on this httle New World colony as 
it had not shone on any of the other colonies 
as yet, they wondered? 

A year of ship building, and then Tuenis 
could stand it no longer. The roving spirit 
of his grandfather, Henry Hudson's mate, and 
his father, the trapper, filled his heart. 

^^The lad wants to go for an adventure," 
Mynheer Yerrenton said to his wife. '^There 
is a bark sailing up the Hudson for pelts this 
spring. I will see that Tuenis has a chance to 
go with the traders and have a taste of the 
wild Hfe up north." 

So Tuenis took passage on a sailing boat, 
so small that it merited the Indians' name of 
a white bird. It was stored with provisions 
and those bright trinkets that had value in the 
eyes of the Iroquois tribe into whose wilder- 
ness kingdom on either side of the Hudson 



FOLLOWING THE BEAVER'S TRAIL 59 

this little band of white men fearlessly 
journeyed. A few hours away from the 
shelter of the fort and the friendly candlelight 
from the little windows of New Amsterdam, 
and there was no sight of any habitation. 
Great wooded hills shut the traders in, and the 
only sounds were the sharp calls of the foxes 
or the cries of Indians. There were trading 
posts along the way for many miles, but so 
isolated that they were often a day's sail 
apart. The Dutch farms, called poltroons, 
hugged the shores of the river near enough to 
New Amsterdam to claim its protection. 

The trip would have been a great adventure 
for any lad, particularly for Tuenis Jansen 
whose ancestors had sailed this great Hudson 
river before. Most of all, he was interested 
in that green trail along the bank v\^hich had 
started at New Amsterdam and could still be 
seen, although it was sometimes lost in the 
dense forest that grew deeper the farther 
north they sailed. The Broad Way it came 
to be called later. 

After a few days out, a thunder storm came 
up and the trading sloop rocked like a toy 



60 FOLLOWING THE BEAVER'S TRAIL 

boat. Through the darkness the sailors 
could see a mountain, raising its head above 
the hills; as they approached it a great cloud 
on its peak seemed to burst and descend upon 
the little ship. 

'The goblin^s hat! The goblin^s sugar loaf 
hat!'' the cry went up suddenly from the 
terrified sailors. As Tuenis ran to the bow of 
the vessel and looked up in the direction they 
pointed, it did seem as if there was a little 
pointed white hat resting on the mast head. 
No one dared climb up and take it down. 
Ever since New Amsterdam had been settled 
there had been rumors of the evil this goblin 
of Dunderberg mountain could work. The 
ship rolled and rocked, in continual danger 
of overturning or of being thrown up on the 
rocks of the shore. In this perilous way she 
drove through the Highlands of the Hudson. 

Then she was clear of Dunderberg, the 
storm lifted, and those of the sailors who had 
seen the goblin's sugar loaf hat said that it 
rose from the mast and whirled through the 
air like a top, up to the mountain. The ship 
settled back and the Hudson was as smooth 



FOLLOWING THE BEAVER'S TRAIL 61 

as a mill pond. There, again, was the green 
trail along the bank, broader, and filled with 
Indian braves, painted and wearing their 
feather headdresses to welcome the traders. 
There was a log trading station near the bank, 
its walls hung with valuable skins and pelts, 
so the party landed to rest for the night, take 
on a cargo, and then start home. 

It took courage for Tuenis to sleep that 
night on a bed of skins with Indians lying near 
him, the glow of their camp fire in his eyes 
and the hooting of owls in his ears. Perhaps 
that is why he awoke so early and went over 
at daybreak to the building where the trading 
had already begun. Soup for all was cooking 
over a great out door fire and there was a lively 
kind of bargaining going on as the traders 
selected their furs and the Indians their scarlet 
cloth or buttons or beads. 

Tuenis looked along the trail, wondering 
again. As far as he could see this Broad Way 
of the traders stretched north, a road leading 
to traps and valuable trees and rich land that 
would yield food. As soon as their business 
was over, the traders would sail back to New 



62 FOLLOWING THE BEAVER'S TRAIL 

Amsterdam at the sea port end of the trail, 
with its tides waiting for ships, and its ships 
waiting for cargoes, and the Old World wait- 
ing to buy. 

Here, Tuenis realized all at once, was the 
secret of New Amsterdam's prosperity. Her 
thrifty burghers had cut a trail through the 
wilderness that meant the beginnings of busi- 
ness for America, honest buying and selling, 
and a short cut between supply and demand. 
Not even the sugar loaf hat of the Dunderberg 
goblin could work evil to New Amsterdam if 
she continued to broaden the trail that led 
from the beaver's lodge and the Indian's 
wigwam down the river to the sea and the 
ships. 

Tuenis grew up and married and lived to 
see trouble come to New Amsterdam through 
Indian warfare and foreign disputes over the 
ownership of the Island of Manhattan. But 
the difficulties were settled. He and Grietje 
built their own house after the fashion of 
Holland and followed the good example of 
Peter Stuyvesant who found New York as 



FOLLOWING THE BEAVER'S T RAIL 63 

comfortable a place to live in as New Amster- 
dam had been. 

They were proud of the new seal of New 
York on which were stamped a beaver, a 
windmill and a barrel of flour. It was, also, 
one of the seals of our liberty, for it represented 
the development of honest business and thrift, 
domestic trade and commerce, without which 
no people can be free from the foe of poverty. 



AT THE GATE OF OLD HARVARD 

Cotton Mather sat in the doorway of 
Master Ezekial Cheever^s grammar school in 
Boston, a lead plummet in his hand and a 
measure of corn and vegetables on the 
threshold at his side. It was nearing the end 
of the seventeenth century and there were 
schools now in New England. 

Cotton was the son of Increase Mather, who 
was very well thought of in Boston because 
of his great learning, and Cotton, himself, at 
twelve years was about the brightest boy in 
Master Cheever's Latin class. He knew it, 
too, and he had rather enjoyed the whispered 
comments of the other boys when he had been 
chosen to sit there in the door and watch for a 
passing customer for the basket of garden 
truck. 

''Cotton Mather, as learned as his father!'' 
was what they said, with suppressed titters. 

They looked upon him as a prig, Cotton 



AT THE GATE O F OLD HARVARD 65 

thought. Well, let them. It had given him 
this opportunity to study in the sunshine 
instead of in the small, crowded school room. 
The basket at his feet represented part of old 
Master Cheever^s salary as school master and 
some boy had to watch for a customer who 
would pay for this harvest from the school 
field near by in wampum, beaver pelts or 
some other currency of the time. The school 
boys had to help cultivate the school field and 
pick the corn and beans and peas, so they 
were always interested in getting a good price 
for them. 

Cotton's thoughts were wool-gathering. He 
was supposed to copy on his ruled sheets of 
foolscap ten times this sentence which had 
been handed down to these younger Puritans 
by their Puritan fathers: 

"Unless schools and colleges flourish the 
state cannot live." 

There was no reason why Cotton should 
not fill his copy book with neat, small script 
for his was an excellent, well sharpened plum- 
met. They were making plummets now in 
Boston by pouring melted lead into little 



66 AT THE GATE OF OLD HARVARD 

wooden moulds and then cutting away the 
wood with a jack knife. These plummets 
were moulded in very interesting shapes, like 
a woodcutter's axe, a cannon, or a battledore. 
Cotton's plummet was shaped like an Indian's 
tomahawk and he had tied it securely to his 
ruler by a hemp string so as not to lose it. 
But instead of writing with it, he looked back 
over his shoulder into the school room, think- 
ing what good luck his was in escaping Master 
Cheever's glaring spectacles for even a half 
hour. 

The school house was small and crowded. 
It was built of logs with bark shingles to pro- 
tect the sloping roof, and the windows turned 
on hinges and had small, diamond shaped 
glass panes. There were pegs driven in the 
walls on all four sides of the room at a con- 
venient height, and long boards laid across 
these pegs made the older boys' desks. The 
little chaps sat on log benches in the center 
of the room within easy reach of Master 
Cheever's birch rod. There was not a picture, 
a black-board or a plant to be seen, and the 
walls and ceiling were dingy from the thick 



AT THE GATE OF OLD HARVARD 67 

smoke that the great fireplace sent up in the 
winter. 

Master Cheever, an odd figure in his long 
black coat and knee breeches, black skull cap, 
and with his white beard reaching to his 
leather belt rose. The class in Latin was to 
stand before him and recite. The boys looked 
like great, great grandfathers in their square 
skirted coats and trousers with buttons at 
the knees. They were little lads to be learning 
Latin so early. But they knew that they were 
the future makers of New England — doctors 
with pill bags, lawyers with important rolls of 
parchment and the ministers who would 
preach hour long sermons in the years to 
come. They valiantly struggled through 
their verbs and conjugations and then made 
place for the class in arithmetic. These boys 
were going to be ship masters some day, send- 
ing vessels to the West Indies for sugar and 
coffee and to England for fine broadcloth and 
manufactured wares. They would stand 
behind the shop counters in Boston measuring 
out corn and cambric and tape and ribbon; 
or they would wield a blacksmith^s hammer. 



68 AT THE GATE OF OLD HARVARD 

or learn the trade of carpentry or shoemaking 
or tailoring. So they, in turn, struggled with 
the multiplication tables and the tables of 
weights and measures, urged on by Master 
Cheever^s rod. 

Cotton, watching, felt rather supercilious. 
He knew the Latin verbs and conjugations for 
the day and he could have repeated those 
arithmetic tables backward. He turned away 
from the row of toiling boys and the sound of 
their droning voices, looking across the road 
toward the green common. It was a very 
pleasant day in fall and the smell of the salt 
water was in the air. 

Cotton saw an Indian sauntering along the 
road that led toward Newtowne. He was 
probably on his way home to the forest, 
having sold some skins at the Boston market. 
Cotton surmised. He laid down his plummet 
and picked up Master Cheever's vegetables, 
running after the Indian who turned when he 
heard footsteps and looked gravely at the 
yellow corn and fat green beans. Cotton 
gesticulated, pointing to the basket and then 
to the Indian's belt, and the red man grunted 



AT THE GATE OF OLD HARVARD 69 

at last, understanding. He took a handful 
of lead bullets from a pocket in his belt and 
gave them to Cotton, taking the basket from 
him in return and stalking off with it. The 
boy counted the bullets; he had made a good 
bargain. He tied them up in his handker- 
chief and then stood a moment considering. 
At last he made his decision. He was going 
to play truant. He struck off down the road 
in whose green lengths the Indian had now 
disappeared, the road that led to Newtowne. 

Once having decided to run away. Cotton 
forgot everything but the excitement of being 
out on a public highway when all the other 
boys were shut inside the school room, and he 
made excellent time. His broad toed, fiat 
shoes were well suited to the stones and rough 
way of the Newtowne road. His gray home- 
spun suit that his mother had made after the 
pattern of the suits worn by Master Cheever's 
other Latin class boys did not show the dust 
that Cotton kicked up as he hurried along. 
He knew exactly where he was going and he 
was enjoying the walk hugely. All the rest 
of his life Cotton was going to follow in the 



70 AT THE GATE OF OLD HARVARD 

footsteps of Increase, his father, and even 
beyond in the matter of exhorting the young 
to walk the straight and narrow paths of New 
England goodness. But today he was a 
truant, out on the high road alone. 

'^Good day. Cotton Mather.'' The boy 
stopped and turned to see one of his girl 
neighbors following him. She, too, was 
dressed in homespun and wore a kerchief and 
an apron. She took a small packet from the 
bag at her side and showed its contents to 
Cotton, explaining why she was going his 
way. "It is the cover of our silver tipped jug 
that my father gave the Harvard College 
as our share in helping to pay the expenses 
this year,'' she explained. "The jug is there, 
but he forgot the cover so I am taking it. 
They say there are many gifts made to the 
College, pewter plates and a flock of sheep, a 
silver fruit dish and sugar spoons and salt 
cellars and some bolts of cloth that the ladies 
of Boston have woven to make coats for the 
students." 

"So I have heard. Desire Brewster," Cotton 
said, "and the College has a goodly library 



AT THE GATE OF OLD HARVARD 71 

of the books left by John, Harvard, the son 
of the London butcher, who favored learning 
so much that he gave all his fortune to our 
College for which bounty it is named.'' 

''They have a new wooden fence, I hear,'' 
Desire went on. Then, looking with a 
puzzled expression at Cotton, she asked. 
''Where are you going, Cotton Mather, during 
school hours?" 

''I am going to Harvard College at New- 
towne," the boy answered, ''to have a look 
in the window at the printing press if I can." 

"Oh, Cotton!" Desire's cheeks flushed. "I 
would never dare leave school for that. We 
have no lessons today. What will Master 
Cheever say?" 

"I am not considering that," Cotton re- 
torted, trying to appear brave. "If you like, 
you may walk to Newtowne with me. Desire. 
I can probably get in the printing room if I 
say that you and I brought the cover to the 
silver tipped jug." 

So the two went on, side by side, past the 
fields of ripening harvest, the wooden carts 
that were bringing food stuffs from the farms 



72 AT THE GATE OF OLD HARVARD 

to Boston and the glimpses of the blue sea. 
Then the road turned, and they met an 
occasional student with his books under his 
arm. One was opening the freshly printed 
pages of a very slim paper pamphlet. 

^They are printing almanacs with the signs 
of the weather and instructions about the 
crops/' Desire said. 'We are going to buy 
one to hang oeside the kitchen clock. The 
almanac was the first printing done at Har- 
vard on the first printing press in America, 
was it not, Cotton?^' she asked. 

'^No, not the first. They struck off our 
Freeman's Oath at the first typesetting/' 
Cotton said, straightening with pride. 

Now a tall picket fence could be seen with 
a wide gate and a lantern above it at the edge 
of the road. Behind, as Cotton and Desire 
peered through the gate could be seen a wide 
plot of green grass with a pump and surround- 
ing it, the rude halls of our first college, 
wooden buildings, roughly shingled, and clap 
boarded, the interiors calked and daubed 
with clay, but housing a hall for lectures, a 
library, chambers and study rooms. It was 



AT THE GATE OF OLD HARVARD 73 

Harvard College, bravely opened in the year 
1638, and now, in 1674, a national seat of 
learning. 

Desire slipped through the gate, turning to 
explain to Cotton. ^There is a book in the 
office in which the names of all those who 
have made gifts to Harvard are written down, 
with the obje.cts they gave," she said. '^I 
must see that the lid of the jug is entered in 
the book next the name of our family." She 
was gone then, a demure, gray gowned little 
lass outlined on the green campus. 

Cotton looked at the buildings with awe. 
He wouldn't have been tempted, he knew, to 
play truant anywhere but here. He wanted 
to come to Harvard and graduate; he knew 
almost enough Latin now. He was proud to 
think that his father was going to send him to 
college and he straightened his shoulders and 
put his hands in his pockets. His fingers 
touched the lead bullets. 

Master Ezekial Cheever's bullets! What 
would he say when he discovered his basket 
gone as well as that trusted member of his 
class, Cotton Mather? The shadow lying 



74 AT THE GATE OF OLD HARVARD 

across the face of the sun dial on the Harvard 
campus showed that the day was waning. It 
was not of such great consequence, Cotton 
thought, what Master Cheever would say 
to him as what he would do. There was just 
about time to get through a good birching 
before supper, he realized, and there would 
be no question of Master Cheever's locking 
the school until he had administered it. 
Cotton started back with less haste than he 
had come, but with plenty of courage, for 
he was a Puritan lad. 

Master Cheever, rod in hand, stood in the 
schoolhouse door as Cotton returned. He did 
not say a word as the boy gave him the bul- 
lets; he waited for Cotton's explanation. 
It came at last, quite honestly, if Cotton's 
voice did shake a little in the telHng. 

^'I sold the corn and beans, sir, and then I 
ran away.'' 

''Where did you go. Cotton Mather?" 
Master Cheever asked sternly. 

''I went to Harvard College, Sir." Cotton 
answered. ''I knew my Latin and my tables, 
and I had a great wish to see the Harvard 



AT THE GATE OF OLD HARVARD 75 

printing press. I want to go to college as soon 
as I can, sir/' 

Master Cheever's rod dropped to his side 
and he looked over the head of the boy and 
toward the town hall, remembering something 
momentous that had happened at a town 
meeting when he was a young man. The 
battle with hunger and hardship had scarcely 
been won in New England, when there had 
come the Pilgrim's longing to found a seat of 
learning. Master Cheever remembered how 
the town of Boston had appropriated four 
hundred pounds in the year 1636, half of its 
entire income, to build the seat of learning 
that was now Harvard College. That was 
their next step toward liberty, establishing 
freedom from ignorance and providing for 
the power that comes to a people through 
education. Master Cheever was looking 
ahead, too. He saw Cotton Mather leaving his 
school soon and taking the road to Harvard, 
not as a truant, but a student. Why, the lad 
was going to graduate from Harvard at 
sixteen! 

Cotton waited, but the school master did 



76 AT THE GATE OF OLD HARVARD 

not pick up his rod. The boy wondered, and 
then marvelled as Master Cheever's stern old 
face relaxed and he spoke to him with unusual 
kindness. 

'^You may go this time, Cotton Mather,'' 
he said, ''but see to it that you never play 
truant again,'' he said. 

''Yes, sir. No, I will not, sir." Cotton 
bowed and then started home. There was 
going to be hot hasty pudding with molasses 
for supper he knew, and after supper he would 
sit by the fire and read the new almanac his 
father had bought and plan about going to 
college before long. It had been a great day, 
he decided, and there were even greater ones 
to come. 



> 



THE WHITE MAN'S FOOT 

From his wanderings far to eastward, 
From the regions of the morning, 
From the shining land of Wabun, 
Homeward now returned lagoo. 
The great traveller, the great boaster, 
Full of strange and new adventures, 
Marvels many and many wonders. 

And the people of the village 
Listened to him as he told them 
Of his marvellous adventures, 
Laughing, answered him in this wise: 
^*Ugh! It is indeed lagoo! 
No one else beholds such wonders!" 

He had seen, he said, a water 
Bigger than the Big-Sea- Water, 
Broader than the Gitche Gumee, 
Bitter so that none could drink it. 
At each other looked the warriors, 



78 THE WHITE MAN'S FOOT 

Looked the women at each other, 
Smiled, and said, ^^It cannot be so/' 
^'Kaw,'' they said, ^^it cannot be so!'' 

O'er it, said he, o'er this water 
Came a great canoe with pinions, 
A canoe with wings came flying, 
Bigger than a grove of pine trees, 
Taller than the tallest tree tops! 
And the old men and the women 
Looked and tittered at each other: 
''Kaw!" they said, "we don't believe it!" 

From its mouth, he said, to greet him, 
Came Waywassimo, the lightning. 
Came the thunder, Annemeeke! 
And the warriors and the women 
Looked and tittered at poor lagoo; 
''Kaw!" they said, "what tales you tell us!" 

In it, said he, came a people. 
In the great canoe with pinions 
Came, he said, a hundred warriors. 
Painted white were all their faces 
And with hair their chins were covered! 
And the warriors and the women 



THE WHITE MAN'S FOOT 79 



Laughed and shouted in derision, 
Like the ravens in the tree tops, 
Like the crows upon the hemlocks. 
''Kaw!" they said, "what Hes you tell us! 
Do not think that we believe you." 

Only Hiawatha laughed not, 

But he gravely spoke and answered 

To their jeering and their jesting: 

'True is all lagoo tells us; 

I have seen it in a vision, 

Seen the great canoe wath pinions. 

Seen the people with white faces. 

Seen the coming of this bearded 

People of the wooden vessel 

From the regions of the morning. 

From the shining land of Wabun." 

"Gitche Manito, the Mighty, 
The Great Spirit, the Creator, 
Sends them hither on his errand. 
Sends them to us with his message. 
Wheresoever they move, before them 
Swarms the stinging fly, the Ahmo, 
Swarms the bee, the honey maker: 



80 THE WHITE MAN'S FOOT 

Wheresoever they tread, beneath them 
Springs the White-man's Foot in blossom. 

'Xet us welcome, then, the strangers, 
Hail them as our friends and brothers. 
And the heart's right hand of friendship 
Give them when they come to see us. 
Gitche Manito, the Mighty, 
Said this to me in my vision. 

** I beheld too in that vision 
All the secrets of the future, 
Of the distant days that shall be. 
I beheld the westward marches 
Of the unknown, crowded nations. 
All the land was full of people, 
Restless, struggling, toiling, striving. 
Speaking many tongues, yet feeUng 
But one heart beat in their bosoms. 
In the woodland rang their axes. 
Smoked their towns in all the valleys. 
Over all the lakes and rivers 
Rushed their great canoes of thunder. 



THE WHITE MAN'S FOOT 81 

'Then a darker, drearier vision 
Passed before me, vague and cloud-like; 
I beheld our nation scattered, 
All forgetful of my counsels, 
Weakened, warring with each other: 
Saw the remnants of our people 
Sweeping westward, wild and woeful. 
Like the cloud-rack of a tempest. 
Like the withered leaves in Autumn.'' 



GOING TO LONDON TO VISIT THE KING 

There was a good deal of excitement thrill- 
iug around the supper table of the little house 
of tfce Blue Ball in old Boston. It was 
Josiah FrankHn's house, and the big blue ball 
that hung over the doorway indicated that 
Mr. Franklin made soap and candles to sell. 
A dozen or so Franklin boys and girls, for 
they were a large family, sat on hard wooden 
chairs about the table and looked over their 
earthenware porringers with wide eyed in- 
terest at Ben, their brother. Ben was going 
to work in the morning, that was the reason 
why it was such an eventful meal. 

Ben had left school, and was not only going 
to peddle newspapers through old Boston^s 
narrow, crooked lanes, but he was going to 
help make almanacs and books by setting 
type for them in the shop where they were 
printed. With the founding of schools and 
the introduction of the printing press into 



GOING TO LONDON TO VISIT THE KING 83 



New England there had come a desire among 
the people for expression as represented in a 
free press. Quite a good deal of printing; 
speeches, primers, ballads, two newspapers, 
and even hand bills of one kind and another 
was being done. 

Ben Franklin must have oeen sixteen years 
old, you decide, and have taken out his work- 
ing papers? Not a bit of it! The plump, red 
cheeked little chap who was spooning out his 
mush and milk at the end of the supper table 
and trying not to look conscious under the 
gaze of the whole family was just ten years 
old. He had left grammar school when he was 
eight, for the soap and candle business was 
not profitable enough to pay for more school- 
ing than this in a family of such size as the 
Franklin's. Ben was going to take his place 
as a little man of New England in the morn- 
ing. Even his spelling book and his arithmetic 
had become things of the past. 

The docks and wharves of Boston were 
busy, crowded spots of interest. Almost 
every day sailing packets from England or 
from one of the only two other large cities 



84 GOING TO LONDON TO VISIT THE KING 

of the New World, Philadelphia, or New- 
York anchored there. Trudging to the print- 
ing office of his older brother, James, to whom 
Ben Franklin was apprenticed, the lad often 
loitered to watch the billowing sails of the 
ships. Printing, he soon discovered, was dull 
enough work, but the boys in the booksellers' 
shops where he delivered papers loaned him 
books to read, and Ben's favorite book was 
Robinson Crusoe. How he did long to have a 
voyage and an adventure as Crusoe had! 
Perched on his high stool in the dark, musty 
printing room, setting type, Ben Franklin 
built air castles and dreamed dreams. He 
kept on doing this as he helped write and print 
the New England Courant, his brother's news- 
paper, and peddle it at night, and run around 
Boston in between times gathering news for 
the Courant. Each of Ben Franklin's dreams 
began with a wharf and a ship and ended in 
England. 

Boys have been longing for adventures and 
wanting to run away to find them ever since 
the world began, and some of these boys have 
been right and some wrong in their desire. 



GOING TO LONDON TO VISIT THE KI NG 85 

The reason for Ben Franklin's wanting to be a 
Robinson Crusoe was because he had dis- 
covered that he was not free. 

A lad of the American colonies who was 
going to be a ship builder, or a weaver, or a 
cabinet maker, or a chandler, or a printer was 
apprenticed, just as a lad would have been in 
England, to a man of that trade to learn it. 

This was a natural enough arrangement in 
those days, and had not seemed wrong to 
Josiah Franklin. Ben was bound to his 
brother James until he should be twenty one 
years old. If he wanted to work for any other 
man or at any other trade, his brother could 
prevent it. The newspapers were full every 
day of advertisements for runaway appren- 
tices and there were laws for prosecuting 
them just as if they were slaves. Ben Frank- 
lin felt exactly as all the people who had come 
to the New World felt, and more strongly 
every day, that no matter what the responsi- 
bilities and consequences were, one wanted 
to be independent. 

So one day, when he was seventeen years 
old, Ben Franklin ran away from Boston, 



86 GOING TO LONDON TO VISIT THE KING 

There were fifteen other Franklin boys and 
girls, so he wasn't greatly missed at home, 
poor lad. He sold his books to pay for his 
passage in a leaky boat to New York. There 
was only one printer in New York then, and 
he had no work to offer the lad, so Ben went 
on, not to England, but to Philadelphia, 
walking fifty miles of the way, and reaching 
the city with just one dollar in his pocket 

Philadelphia in the early eighteenth century 
was a clean, snug, garden strewn town, its 
little red brick house made beautiful by white 
colonial doors with columns and shining brass 
knobs. Inside one saw bright rag carpets and 
polished pewter utensils and tea sets of 
flowing blue ware. There was beautiful 
mahogany furniture, too, made there in the 
colonies by English cabinet-makers; great 
four posted beds, high-boys for holding the 
linen, corner cabinets for the pewter platters 
and tea cups, and desks with carved legs and 
secret drawers for hiding letters. A post 
rider stopped once in a while at the Phila- 
delphia meeting house to collect letters that 
he carried in his saddle bags to New York, 



GOING TO LONDON TO VISIT THE KING 87 

and twice each week one could ride to New 
York in a stage coach. 

As Ben Franklin wandered up and down 
Philadelphia's bower like streets, Walnut, 
Spruce, Pine, and the rest, looking at the 
orchards and dairies and shops, he felt just 
as Philadelphia felt then — that the city was 
quite sufficient to herself and had no need of 
England, or of Ben Franklin either. 

In fact that was beginning to be the feeling 
in New York and Boston, too, as the New 
World became able at last to sit and sun itself 
on its newly built doorsteps, resting for a 
space from its pioneer struggles. New feel- 
ings of self sufficiency, aloofness and inde- 
pendence were in the air. 

Ben Franklin, too, determined to be able 
to take care of himself. He was not one whit 
discouraged at having to spend part of his 
last dollar for rolls which he ate in the street. 
He paid out the rest of it for a bed in a tavern, 
and the next day he found work as a printer. 

Philadelphia was growing every day, and 
liked to read and know what was going on in 
the American colonies and in England as 



88 GOING TO LONDON TO VISIT THE KING 

well. The colonies were subject to the British 
Crown and the King of England appointed 
men to have charge of each colony, but 
differences had already begun to arise over 
such questions as shipping and taxation by 
England. It was like the head of a great 
family who suddenly finds that the children 
have grown up over night and have their own 
ideas and will, about what they shall or shall 
not do. The father expects the children to 
help support the family, and the children want 
to support themselves in their own way. Both 
are right, and both wrong. So it was with 
England and the American colonies. 

As Ben Franklin set type and started a 
newspaper and opened a book and stationery 
store and published a magazine and printed 
his Poor Richard^ s Almanac, that still teaches 
us honesty and thrift and industry, he felt 
more and more as the American colonists did. 
He had belonged to a big family and had cut 
loose from it; he had found out the hazards 
and the opportunities of such a course. Some- 
times he wished that he could go back, but 
that was not possible; he had to work out 



GOING TO LONDON TO VISIT THE KING 89 

his freedom just as the colonies would have 
to work out theirs. 

As the years went on, Ben Franklin be- 
came Dr. Benjamin Franklin, wonderfully 
well thought of in Philadelphia. For a long 
time he wore his leather apron in his shop and 
in the book store. He still ate his breakfast 
of bread and milk with a pewter spoon from 
an earthern porringer, and he mixed his own 
ink, and he peddled his newspapers and 
almanacs in a wheelbarrow. But he helped 
Philadelphia to have its first fire company and 
police force. Then they made him postmaster 
general of the Colonies and he had a chance 
to go home for a visit and also travel to all 
the principal points on the Atlantic coast, 
helping to carry and spread news. 

The Leather Apron Club of Philadelphia 
interested Benjamin Franklin as much as 
anything, though, partly because he had 
founded it and partly because it had the first 
subscription library in the Colonies. It had 
been a kind of boys^ club at first, started in 
his hard times, but he had been able to send 
to London for two hundred books that the 



90 GOING TO LONDON TO VISIT THE KING 

Club kept, first, in the house of a member in 
Pewter Platter Lane and then in the Carpen- 
ters' Hall in Philadelphia. The club members 
met there to read and to talk. A great deal of 
the talk was about matters in England. 

Good Queen Anne of England and all her 
children had died years before, and the Eng- 
lish Crown had gone to a certain fussy, hot 
tempered German family from Hanover in 
Germany, cousins of Anne's family. The 
earliest Hanover to take the throne was King 
George I, who could not speak a word of the 
language of the land he had come to govern, 
and who ruled as easily as he could. He let 
his prime minister select his cabinet and he 
never attended the meetings, for he could not 
understand what was being said. George II 
liked a fight and was eager for military glory 
and he had a very hot temper. It was said 
that he used to stamp his feet and tear off his 
wig and kick it when he fell into a passion. 
Although he went to church in Westminster 
Abby, he did not understand the service and 
used to talk out loud in German. That was 
a poor inheritance for George III of this house 



GOING TO LONDON TO VISIT THE KIN G 91 

of Hanover who took England^s throne in the 
year 1760. He was only twenty two years old, 
but he decided that, no matter what obstacles 
he met, he would be king and England should 
do as he said, whether she liked it or not. 

That was what Benjamin Franklin and his 
friends were talking and thinking about. Eng- 
lish laws now hmited the Colonists' trade. 
George III said that a stamp bought in 
England must be placed on every American 
book, pamphlet and other articles. England 
had to protect her own trade, of course, and 
she felt that these wayfaring children of hers 
over in the New World ought to help support 
their mother country. Benjamin Frankhn 
could see both sides of things, but he saw, 
also, that this might be the beginning of a 
long trouble. 

''Will you go over and talk to King George 
about it?'' the Leather Apron Club, and 
Philadelphia, and at last all the Colonies 
asked Benjamin Franklin. Here, at last, was 
the adventure of his dreams, and it had come 
when Benjamin Franklin was an old man, 
sixty years old. 



92 GOING TO LONDON TO VISIT THE KING 

London in the year 1766 was just the kind 
of town that Mother Goose pictures for us. 
In fact a great deal of Mother Goose's 
nonsense is really true and has to do with the 
odd ways of kings and queens, lords and 
ladies who were not able to see with the eyes 
of all the people. Read her over again and 
find this out! 

There were narrow streets in London, the 
upper stories of the quaint gabled houses 
extending so far above the lower ones that 
they almost touched. Smoky oil lanterns 
lighted the picture signs of the shops, The 
Swan, The Golden Fleece and The Red Lion. 
Simple Simon could be seen trundling pies 
along the lanes and cr3dng his wares; and 
if the ladies did not exactly ride to Banbury 
Cross with bells on their toes, at least they 
went in crinolines and high headdresses, riding 
in gilt coaches that rattled gaily along over 
London's cobble stones. It was London's 
day of: 



GOING TO LONDON TO VISIT THE KING 93 

'Xavender blue, and rosemary green, 
I am the King and you are the Queen. 
Call up my maids at four o'clock, 
Some to the wheel and some to the rock, 
Some to make hay, and some to shear corn; 
But you and I will keep ourselves warm/' 

As Benjamin Franklin walked along the 
streets of London in his plain clothes, gentle- 
men in powdered periwigs and velvet knee 
breeches stopped to take pinches of snuff from 
their gold snuff-boxes — ^but really to smile at 
this plain old man from the American 
Colonies. He was thinking too busily, though, 
to notice them. He was realizing how very 
different from each other the two Englands, 
the Old and the New, had grown. He was 
wondering, too, what King George would say 
to him. But after all King George told his 
ministers what to say to this old printer who 
had come to England to barter with a royal 
will. It was the King's Parliament, not the 
King himself, that ►Benjamin Franklin had to 
face. 

Fancy an old, dim room in stately West- 



94 GOING TO LONDON TO VISIT THE KING 

minster Hall, built in the days of the Norman 
kings. It was a kind of great court room, and 
filled with the lords of the court of this Hano- 
verian ruler of England, a few of them able 
to see the desires and needs of the Colonies, 
the majority realizing England's need of 
helping to support herself through restricted 
trade with, and taxes levied on her American 
Colonists. Last of all, fancy Benjamin 
Franklin standing before these representatives 
of George III for many days, our first Ameri- 
can diplomatist, and trying to help them to 
see, as he did, both sides of the question. 

"How does America feel toward England?'' 
they asked Benjamin FrankUn. 

"We not only love, but we respect her," 
he replied. 

"Will the Americans pay the stamp duty 
if it is moderated?" they asked next. 

"Never!" he told them. 

"Are you not obliged to buy the articles we 
manufacture?" they queried. 

"We may wear English cloth now," 
Benjamin Franklin answered, "but when our 



GOING TO LONDON TO VISIT THE KING 95 

old clothes are worn out, we will weave the 
cloth for our new ones/' 

^^You will not have wool enough/' they 
told him. 

^'We are going to use no more lambs for 
food/' Benjamin Franklin said to this, ^^and 
in every one of our houses stands a spinning 
wheel." 

Then King George's ministers tried another 
argument. 

^^If we repeal the stamp act, will the 
colonies acknowledge that the English Crown 
has a right to tax them?" they asked. 

^^Never," was Benjamin Franklin's sure 
reply. 

So there the matter stood. The old 
and the new England could not seem to un- 
derstand each other. 

Through Benjamin Franklin's diplomacy 
the stamp act was repealed. He went home 
to see the colonies all ablaze with bonfires 
and hear the church bells from Boston to 
Philadelphia ringing for joy at what he had 
accomplished for liberty. But the repeal of 
the stamp act meant that England had need 



96 GOING TO LONDON TO VISIT THE KING 

of providing some other form of revenue. A 
tax on tea was proposed, and the tea pot of 
the colonists' wrath boiled over at this levy. 

There was no way out of it all except 
through a fair fight. England needed the 
American colonists as her apprentices, and 
the colonists, themselves, wanted to learn 
their trade of freedom alone, and in their own 
way. Back of it all was the despotic will of a 
stubborn, short-sighted King. ^ Benjamin 
Franklin saw the beginning of it and he was 
there, too, at the end of the fight, for America 
was on the verge of Ughting the torches of 
her Revolution. 



RINGING IN THE FOURTH OF JULY 

The bell-ringer of the statehouse in Phila- 
delphia was growing old, and once in awhile 
his little grandson climbed the stairs to the 
belfry and pulled the bell rope to help him. 
It was a long dark way up the dusty stair- 
case and the lad always went as quietly as his 
copper-toed shoes would let him, partly so as 
not to surprise the mice and bats into coming 
down to meet him, and partly to avoid dis- 
turbing the great men of the country who 
met in the assembly room of the statehouse. 

They were the important statesmen of the 
American Colonies, old Dr. Benjamin Frank- 
lin, who could accomplish almost anything 
from printing an almanac to catching light- 
ning, Mr. Thomas Jefferson who was looked 
up to as the wise scribe of the Colonies. 
His desk in the statehouse was so covered 
with quill pens and papers and red seals that 
the lad scarcely dared to dust it. There was 



98 RINGING IN THE FOURTH OF JULY 

Mr. John Adams of Massachusetts, also, who 
had seen a shipload of bales of tea turned 
overboard in Boston Harbor three years 
before because the Colonists refused to pay 
a tax on it to King George III of England. 
John Adams loved a cup of fragrant tea 
served in Boston's blue and white china, but 
he loved his country more. 

On his way up toward the belfry stairs, 
the bell-ringer's grandson peeped in the door 
at these men and those others with them in 
knee breeches, silver buckled shoes, and 
powdered hair that was worn by some in 
braided queues. They were the members of 
the first American Congress, and their talk 
was of the Colonies they represented, stretch- 
ing now from Maine to Georgia; what was 
best for them in the way of government that 
the people might be free, and yet united. The 
idea had already come to this first body of 
law makers that laws should not be made to 
limit a man's freedom, but to give men new 
liberty to live and work and think by freeing 
them from wrong doing, lawlessness, and 
crime. 



RINGING IN THE FOURTH OF JULY 99 

This matter of governing a new nation was 
becoming increasingly important. The Con- 
gress reaUzed that, and so it was sitting in the 
statehouse of old Philadelphia on a very 
warm summer afternoon, the fourth of July 
in the year 1776. 

The lad turned away from the door. Per- 
haps it would be better not to ring the bell 
for sunset because the Congress was sitting 
so late, he decided. His grandfather was up 
in the belfry polishing the bell, and he would 
wait and go up when the gentlemen of the 
Congress started home. The boy stood a 
little while in the doorway of the brick build- 
ing and looked down Chestnut Street on which 
it stood 

There came the post rider, his mail pouches 
gray with dust, and his horse's hoofs strik- 
ing sparks on the paving stones in the warm, 
gathering twilight. What an adventuresome 
life a post rider's was, the lad thought envi- 
ously. They rode between all the cities of the 
new nation, meeting at the borders of the 
Colonies to exchange and carry on letters and 
packets. 



100 RINGING IN THE FOURTH OF JULY 

The post riders were making and living the 
geography of the American Colonies which 
were too young and were growing up too fast 
to be between book covers or on maps yet in 
the schools. They rode to the green pasture 
land of New Hampshire, heard the whir of 
spinning wheels in Connecticut and passed 
the gate of Harvard College in Boston. They 
talked to the fishermen of Rhode Island and 
the trappers of New York; stopped for 
foaming mugs of milk in some dairy of New 
Jersey or Pennsylvania, passed fertile farms 
of Delaware and Maryland, had supper of 
hot corn bread and ham on a rich Virginia 
tobacco plantation, and rode past white 
cotton fields in the Carolinas or Georgia. 
Thirteen thriving, growing, alert American 
Colonies, aUke in their desire for liberty, and 
different in their settlement, people, work, 
products and mode of thinking. But they 
were keeping together after a fashion, for they 
all sent delegates to the Continental Congress 
here in Philadelphia, and they were united 
at heart in a league of neighborly friendship 
and for common defense. 



RINGING IN THE FOURTH OF JULY 101 

The post rider was gone now. The lad in 
the door of the statehouse could see nothing 
but a cloud of gray dust up Chestnut Street 
where he had been. It was the quiet, dim end 
of a sultry day and the street was empty, for 
the early supper tables would soon be laid. 
At least Chestnut Street had been empty. 
Now the boy saw that it was suddenly begm- 
ning to fill. Housewives who had neglected 
to take off their cooking aprons, shop keepers 
with their tape measures still dangling over 
their shoulders, a raw recruit of a soldier who 
held his musket awkwardly because his hands 
were more used to a spade, a barrister in a 
long black robe and huge wig, even the post 
rider returned, all these and more moved 
toward the stately old building that housed 
the Congress. What could it mean, the bell 
ringer's grandson wondered, shrinking back 
into the shadow of the doorway? 

As he waited, the door of the assembly room 
opened, and he saw that Mr. Thomas Jefferson 
held a very long and important looking 
document in his hand from which he was 
reading in his strong, clear voice. The boy 



102 RINGING IN THE FOURTH OF JULY 

could catch some of the words, and so could 
that part of the crowd outside nearest the 
open windows: 

^^When, in the course of human events, it 
becomes necessary for one people to dissolve 
the political bands which have connected 
them with another, and to assume, among 
the powers of the earth, the separate and 
equal station to which the laws of nature and 
of nature's God entitle them^-'' Mr. Jefferson 
read. He went on: — 

'We, therefore, the representatives of the 
United States of America in general Congress 
assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge 
of the world for the rectitude of our inten- 
tions, do, in the name, and by authority of 
the good people of these colonies, solemnly 
publish and declare, that these United 
Colonies are, and of right ought to be free 
and independent states.'' 

That was the word that held the crowd 
breathless, ' 'independent." 

Then Mr. Jefferson finished: — 

'That as free and independent States, they 
have full power to levy war, conclude peace. 



RINGING IN THE FOURTH OF JULY 103 

contract alliances, establish commerce, and 
to do all other acts and things which inde- 
pendent States may do. And, for the support 
of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the 
protection of Divine Providence, we mutually 
pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, 
and our sacred honor.'' 

There was a silence of only a second. Then 
the ayes of the Congress, pledging the new 
nation's support to this declaration of inde- 
pendence filled the room, and resounded in the 
street and re-echoed from the crowd, mingling 
with their cheers. 

'^Ring the bell for freedom!" some one 
shouted. 

Now his chance had come to celebrate the 
fourth of July, 1776, the bell ringer's grandson 
knew, and he ran up the stairs to the belfry, 
kicking up almost as much dust as the post 
rider and not one whit afraid of the scurrying 
mice and the flapping winged bats. 

^'Ring the bell, grandfather," he cried, 
'^Ring it, the Congress and the people say, for 
freedom!" 

Taking hold of the rope, the lad pulled too, 



104 RINGING IN THE FOURTH OF JULY 

helping his grandfather with all his might as 
peal after peal rang out through the summer 
evening and was the signal for more shouts 
of joy in the street and the pealing of every 
other bell in old Philadelphia. 

There are Christmas bells that chime for 
peace, and church bells that call us to think 
of holy things, the jester jingles his bells for 
mirth, and the sheep bells tinkUng along 
country lanes at sunset tell us of the plenty 
and comfort of the farm. But the ringing of 
the Liberty Bell on that first fourth of July 
held the message of all these others. It 
sounded the desire for a day when wars would 
not be needed. It rang for religious and civil 
liberty, for the right to enjoy play and work 
without autocratic interference, and for free- 
dom to develop and enjoy all the prosperity 
that the fertile earth offered. So it rings to- 
day, and will always ring in the hearts of free 
peoples. 

It was a very fine way of celebrating a great 
day, and particularly for the lad who was 
able to have a part in it. No one thought 
about wasting money on fire crackers or pop- 



RINGING IN THE FOURTH OF JULY 105 

guns, or rockets, for the people of the Colonies 
saw a long road ahead of them before they 
should be able to work out their independence. 
The call of the Liberty Bell was all the 
celebration they wanted or needed to start 
them along that road. The next year, though, 
saw them holding our flag. The Congress had 
adopted one, thirteen broad red and white 
stripes, and thirteen white stars, circled in a 
blue field, for the thirteen original American 
colonies, and waving for freedom. 



KEEPING CHRISTMAS WITH 
GENERAL WASHINGTON 

A Christmas tree, with shining candles and 
a gold star set on the topmost branch! The 
sentinel in the worn uniform of the Conti- 
nental Army could see it quite plainly there 
in front of him as he paced the picket line of 
the camp on the Delaware through the cold 
and the driving snow. Then he pulled his 
worn cape closer around his bowed shoulders 
and quickened his pace. He was almost 
freezing, he realized that now. Numb from 
head to foot, he had a strange, dream-like 
kind of feeling, and the Christmas tree that 
he had thought he saw was part of a dream. 
It was a pine tree growing on the bleak bank 
of the river, hung with icicles, its branches 
creaking in the winter wind, and a lonely star 
shining down through a cloud upon it. 

Christmas night in his home in Virginia! 
The sentinel could see his house there at the 



CHRISTMAS WITH GENERAL WASHINGTON 107 

end of the road, the Hght in the window mak- 
ing a bright path leading toward him across 
the snow. It was a comfortable farmhouse, 
surrounded by rich pasture land and tobacco 
fields and orchards. There were horses and 
dogs without number in the stables and the 
storehouse was hung with hams and sides of 
bacon and freshly killed fowl for the holiday 
feasting. All the family, his brothers, his 
mother and his father were gathered about 
the great log fire in the living room, keeping 
Christmas together. How warm and com- 
fortable it was! 

No, this was just another dream, the 
sentinel understood, as he stamped on the 
frozen snow and swung his arms to fight the 
stupor of the cold that had again crept over 
him. The light he saw shone through the 
chinks in one of the rude log huts of the army 
camp. There were other huts scattered 
along the new roads for holding this depleted 
remnant of the Continental troops who were 
fighting for the liberty of the American 
colonies. The soldiers had chopped down 
trees from the neighboring hillsides for build- 



1 08 CHRISTMAS WITH GENERAL WASHINGTON 

ing their shelters and had put up the huts 
that December, with the winter upon them. 
They had worked in storms, the wind biting 
through their threadbare clothing, and with 
no food except flour mixed with water and 
baked in the coals of an outdoor fire, a strip 
of tough beef once in a while, or a tin of stale 
fish. 

The sentinel himself was crowded with 
many other soldiers in the cabin whose light 
he had mistaken for home candles. There 
was no floor except the frozen earth and not 
even straw enough to make beds for all the 
men. They had only pieces of worn blankets 
left and it bade fair to be a bitter winter. 
The beggared camp at McConkey's Ferry was 
his only home this Christmas night. His 
father and brothers had been killed in the 
first year of the American Revolution; his 
Christmas company was the valiant fellow- 
ship of an undaunted army of farmers, 
blacksmiths, teachers, shop keepers, printers, 
preachers, one and all men of the Colonies who 
had voluntarily given up their peaceful trades 
and their homes for freedom's sake. They had 



CHRISTMAS WITH GENERAL WASHINGTO N 109 

shouldered muskets, and followed the torch 
that, lighted on Bunker Hill in 1775, had 
kindled the watch fires of the new nation from 
the north to the south. 

Were those holly berries from his Virginia 
woods, the sentinel wondered, that lay so red 
in the snow at his feet? He stopped a moment 
to look. Then he gripped his musket and 
smiled grimly as he forced himself to hasten 
his march. They were drops of blood from 
his feet, for the frozen stubble had cut through 
his ragged soles, but what did that matter, he 
thought? All the Colonies were shedding 
their blood in a plucky fight for freedom. 

There had been ups and downs so far for the 
Continental Army, mainly defeats of late. 
King George III of England had not been 
able to spare enough EngHsh troops to send 
to America, and so he had hired soldiers from 
certain states in Germany that were known as 
the Hesses. These German soldiers were 
called Hessians and they had sailed into New 
York harbor in 1776, thousands strong, to 
reinforce the English troops of Sir William 
Howe, More and still more Hessians came 



1 10 CHRISTMAS WITH GENERAL WASHINGTON 

until they swelled the forces of the enemy to 
the number of almost thirty thousand men, 
and the Continental Army had only a scant 
ten thousand left. This invading army under 
General Howe had sailed down from New 
York City to Philadelphia, unchecked all the 
way, and now occupied Philadelphia which 
had grown to be America's largest city. 

A terrible winter season was on its way. 
The army of invasion was comfortably housed 
for cold weather in Philadelphia with plenty of 
food and stores of ammunition. The camp 
across the Deleware close at hand and natural- 
ly defended by the hills, had been built to meet 
Howe by a brave handful of the Colonials. 
If they could prevent the enemy from com- 
municating with New York until spring, if 
they did not starve before then, they might 
see hope. But they were less than three 
thousand strong, ragged, cold, and half 
famished. They faced the worst odds of the 
whole Revolution. 

Picket duty in the Revolution was one of 
the most important kinds of soldiering, and 
the hardest. Half clad, shivering with the 



CHRISTMAS WITH GENERAL WASHINGTON 111 

bitter cold, and with the driving snow wrap- 
ping him like a garment, the sentinel paced 
back and forth. It was a duty that had to be 
done. General Howe was likely to move out 
from Philadelphia and attack at any moment; 
there were spies about, waiting for an op- 
portunity to slip into the headquarters of the 
Continentals in the stolen uniform of a 
Continental soldier and take back information 
to the enemy. There had been spies who had 
tried to stir up a mutiny among the war worn 
troops of the Colonies. Shifting his musket 
from one shoulder to the other that his hands 
might not freeze to the steel, the sentinel 
remembered the trouble these spies of the 
king had made. He repeated to himself what 
his own hut mates had said to him: 

'^What is the use of going on?" they had 
asked. ''It is a losing fight and the odds are 
against us. We are new at soldiering and the 
troops that have been sent from England to 
defeat us have been trained for years.'' 

They had made other whispered complaints 
also. 

''Why doesn't the Continental Congress 



1 12 CHRISTMAS WITH GENERAL WASHINGTON 

send us food and blankets and overcoats and 
shoes? We could perhaps get home to a fire 
and a warm pot of porridge if we slipped 
through the Unes. It^s not many miles to 
Philadelphia and the Hessians would only 
wink at us, or help us on our way." 

There is nothing like cold and hunger for 
taking the courage out of a man's heart; the 
lonely sentinel knew that all too weU. His 
back bent to meet the blast of a savage, 
driving north-easter that had just sprung up. 
It seemed as if he could not straighten his 
hunched figure to lift liis musket again. 
Suppose he were to drop his gun there in the 
snow? Would his broken shoes take him 
those twenty miles to Philadelphia? But a 
whirling gust of the gale made a little opening 
in the white curtain of the snow that hung in 
front of him, and the sentinel suddenly drew 
himself up to his full height, looking through. 
His eyes were not playing him tricks this 
time. It was not a dream he saw, but the 
reality of this Christmas night. 

An open boat, with the red, white and blue 
colors of the Colonies whipped by the wind 



CHRISTMAS WITH GENERAL WASHINGTON 1 13 

at its bow rocked on the bank of the river, 
with thick blocks of ice floating near and 
threatening to crush it. Facing it at the 
edge of the icy, foaming stream was the tall 
figure of a man who the sentinel knew and 
loved, as did every soldier in the Continental 
Army know and love him. He was erect and 
stalwart as he stood there looking across the 
Delaware River through the storm. His 
three cornered hat, with its tri-colored cockade 
of liberty in front was pushed back, showing 
his high forehead and his thick brown hair. 
In spite of the lines of discouragement in his 
face his eyes were clear and bright with hope. 
His cloak, blown open in the gale, showed his 
blue and buff uniform of the Colonies. He 
was a strong, healthy, courageous looking 
man and the sentinel, seeing him, took new 
courage also. 

He was the commanding ofiicer of the 
Continental Army and had more to bear that 
Christmas night, the sentinel knew, than his 
men. He, too, was away from the fireside 
of his home on a Virginia plantation. He had 
given up the quiet farming life he loved, his 



114 CHRISTMAS WITH GENERAL WASHINGTON 

comfort, ease, and wealth because he could not 
keep these and do his duty to his country too. 
The sentinel knew what this officer was 
thinking: 

^^Not one of my men suffers and dies, but 
it is my suffering and my responsibility. I 
am carrying all they are and more, for the 
whole weight of the American Revolution is 
my burden. I am almost overpowered. I 
must face ten times my number of soldiers 
with a handful of ragged, tired, poorly armed 
troops. It is a trust too great for my capacity, 
but it has been a kind of destiny that has been 
thrown upon me, and it was utterly out of my 
power to refuse it.'' 

The sentinel watched, straining his eyes 
to see his general's slightest move. Suddenly 
he saw him pull the boat closer to shore and 
step into it, taking his place beside the colors 
that floated at the bow. Following him, from 
the huts of Valley Forge, a line of ragged 
soldiers made their way through the storm 
with their muskets over their shoulders and 
took their places silently in the boat. 

George Washington, commander-in-chief of 



CHRISTMAS WITH GENERAL WASHINGTON 115 

the Continental troops, had decided to take 
the greatest hazard of the entire Revolution. 
He was going to try and cross the half frozen 
Delaware in an ice storm with a handful of 
weakened men and surprise the Hessians' 
first line of defense at Trenton. 

The sentineFs hour of picket duty was 
ended and with it came an end to his doubts 
and discouragement. That was always the 
effect of General Washington's presence upon 
his men. They knew that he never weakened, 
never gave up struggling, and his defeats only 
spurred him on to an ultimate victory. He 
had taken command of the undisciplined, 
untrained men of the Colonies in 1775 whose 
only hope was their patriotism and determina- 
tion, and he had made them into an army that 
King George was beginning to worry about 
in spite of his own picked regiments sent to 
defeat it. The sentinel knew that he could 
be one of these Revolutionary heroes under 
the leadership of General Washington. 

Instead of finding, as he might have, the 
poor fire in his hut in camp, he stumbled 
through the snow drifts and the cutting sleet 



1 16 CHRISTMAS WITH GENERAL WASHINGTON 

toward the river. There were other boats 
filling fast and noiselessly with Washington's 
men. The sentinel could find his way to them 
by the blood stains along the snow, left by 
the torn feet of his fellow soldiers. It was 
Christmas night, the night when hope for 
the whole earth was born to men, and peace 
was offered to the world. The men of 
Washington's command with this high hope 
in their hearts were going to keep Christmas 
by trying to bring again that peace which 
their country had lost. 

The valiant little expedition under General 
Washington's intrepid leadership crossed the 
river from the Pennsylvania side during the 
worst storm of the winter. They were to be 
met by troops from Philadelphia and from 
Bristol who would reinforce them sufficiently 
to make possible an attack upon the Hessians. 
But the Delaware was a floating mass of 
cakes of ice, some of Washington's men were 
frozen to death in crossing, and the rein- 
forcements failed him. But early on the 
following morning the half frozen, half amipd 
Continentals attacked the Hessian front line 



CHRISTMAS WITH GENERAL WASHINGTON 117 



at Trenton, di^ove in their pickets, surrounded 
the camp, fought their way through the town, 
completely surprising the enemy, and re= 
crossed the Delaware River with a thousand 
prisoners. 

It was a turning point of the Revolution, 
an unprecedented piece of bravery on the 
part of General Washington and his half de= 
feated army that put new life into the cause 
of liberty. It set King George a.nd his fol- 
lowers to thinking, and more and still more 
English statesmen were won over to the 
cause of these struggling brothers of theirs on 
the other side of the Atlantic. 

The Christmas snow^s of the camp melted, 
and the ground was warm once more and 
bright with grass and wild flov/ers. The 
French nation, which has always loved inde- 
pendence, helped the Colonies by lending 
them money and sending them supplies. A 
young French nobleman, the Marquis de 
Lafayette, scarcely older than a boy, organized 
a relief expedition and ran away to America 
to help General Washington in his later 
campaigns. 



118 CHRISTMAS WITH GENERAL WASHINGTON 

There came a day when Lord CornwalHs 
and his British army of many thousands of 
men were penned up in Yorktown in Virginia, 
and on the nineteenth of October in 1781 
he made a brave surrender to General Wash- 
ington. 

That was the end of our Revolution. Eng- 
land recognized the freedom of the United 
States and on the third of September 1783 
a treaty of peace between Great Britain and 
the United States of America w^as signed at 
Versailles in France. It had been a fair fight, 
but King George had not been able to get men 
to serve in an army of invasion , and the people 
and parliament supported the war only half 
heartedly. For a great many years we have 
spoken of the American Revolution as our 
war with England for independence. It was 
more than that. It was our struggle for a 
recognition of the rights of English folk in 
America, and other peoples everywhere for 
that matter, as opposed to the autocracy of a 
self willed, ambitious German King. 



THE GHOST THAT HAUNTED WALL 
STREET 

There had never, before, been such a crowd 
along Wall Street in New York as there was 
that last day of April in the year 1789. It 
filled the road and banked the sidewalks and 
was thickest in front of the Federal Hall, 
women in their best bonnets and Uttle girls 
in hoop skirts and flowered frocks, men wear- 
ing tall hats and boys in odd little round caps 
and very long trousers. They all pushed their 
way closer and kept their eyes fixed on the 
balcony of this old Federal building as if they 
expected to see someone of importance there. 

The Stars and Stripes floated everywhere, 
the colors on all the buildings showing brightly 
against the blue of the water just the other 
side of the wall that protected the street from 
tides. The people who carried our flag, many 
of whom had traveled by carriage for this great 
occasion from as far north as Massachusetts 



120 THE GHOST THAT HAUNTED WALL STREET 

and as far south as Virginia, waved it with a 
new and personal kind of pride. Two years 
before a body of the leading men of the 
Colonies had met in convention at Phil- 
delphia and had framed a constitution and 
decided that, since peace had come, the 
Colonies needed a closer relationship for 
mutual help and growth. So they were now 
the United States with a Congress of two 
branches, one to be made up of men elected 
by the people and the other from names 
suggested by the states' own bodies of law 
makers, the legislatures. It seemed like a fair 
plan of government for our new nation, 
standing alone at last. The people believed 
in it; that was why their eyes were on the 
balcony of the Federal Hall in Wall Street. 
As they watched, a man stepped out and 
faced them. He wore a plain suit of brown 
cloth that had been spun, woven and cut in 
his native state of Virginia, and the metal 
buttons on the coat were stamped with 
eagles, our new emblem of liberty. As this 
man leaned forward to speak to the people. 



THE GHOST THAT HAUNTED WALL STREET 121 

a great shout as from one voice went up from 
the street below. 

''President Washington! Our General and 
leader, George Washington, the first president 
of the United States!'' the people cried. 

That was who it was, and that, too, was the 
reason for the crowd. The United States had 
chosen a leader and was inaugurating its first 
president there in Federal Hall in New York 
City. The cheers for President Washington 
were so loud and so long that he could not 
speak for a few moments. He looked, smiling, 
at his friends and then his face grew suddenly 
sober. 

He had seen, with great clearness, a figure 
down there in the crowd that the people did 
not know was there. It was not taking part 
in their joy. It was a gaunt, tattered, hope- 
less kind of vagabond with an empty wallet 
and a look of pinched want on its face. It 
wore the ragged, blood stained uniform of a 
Ptevolutionary soldier, and it had debts of 
many milKons of dollars. The few paper 
bank notes in the ghost's pockets were little 
more than worthless, for there was not enough 



122 THE GHOST THAT HAUNTED WALL STREET 

gold and silver in our national vaults for 
which to exchange them. While they could 
buy food and clothing in some states, in 
others they could buy nothing at all. Pres- 
ident Washington was looking at the ghost of 
America's credit. 

^The nations of the world see that ghost/' 
he thought. They watch it even across the 
ocean, standing here on Wall Street. They 
know that we are in debt and too poor to pay 
our debts or develop our business and our 
trade. ^What is your independence worth?' 
they ask us.'' 

But the happy, hopeful crowd kept on 
shouting its joy and President Washington, as 
he waited, looked away from the ghost and 
back a good many years into a dark, musty 
counting house on one of the islands of the 
West Indies. What he saw, you, too, may see. 

Perched on top of a hard, high stool and 
bending over a lot of thick books full of figures 
on the desk in front of him, was a little boy 
twelve years old. His name was Alexander 
Hamilton and he had a great longing to be 
rich, but his family was poor. Alexander had 



THE GHOST THAT HAUNTED WALL STREET 1 23 

been sent to work in this counting house, when 
other boys were going to school. It might 
have been fun for a boy to work in a grocer's 
shop, or on the wharves where sweet smelling 
spices and bright fruits were loaded into sail- 
ing packets every day, but Alexander's work 
was with figures, adding, subtracting, multi- 
plying and dividing them and making them 
come out with honest results. 

Dull work for a boy of twelve years, was it 
not? But Alexander Hamilton grew to like 
his account books and his balance sheets. If 
he couldn't be rich himself, he at least learned 
how other people earned a good living and paid 
their debts and were able to save something 
beside. It was a matter, he found out, of 
making the money itself work in buying and 
selling, in paying for the labor of men's hands 
and in earning interest. That gave money 
an increased value and greater power, he 
learned. 

As President Washington followed his 
mind's picture of this lad who so interested 
him, he saw him earn his passage to New 
York in order to find greater opportunity to 



124 THE GHOST THAT HAUNTED WALL STREET 

achieve, saw him graduate from Columbia 
college before he was seventeen, saw him, too, 
a slight, dark-eyed lad, talking to great crowds 
of patriots at outdoor meetings through the 
Colonies before the Revolution, urging them 
to have faith in themselves and courage. 
Nothing daunted Alexander Hamilton. He 
had organized a corp of boy patriots called the 
Hearts of Oak and drilled them every morning 
at the New York battery in spite of the fact 
that the cannon of the troops of King George 
was being unloaded there. When the beacon 
fires of the Revolution were lighted and New 
York asked for a company of artillery to be 
raised, Alexander Hamilton had begged for 
its command. He was only nineteen then, 
but he was given the commission. President 
Washington repeated to himself his recollec- 
tion of the lad's command: 

*^I remember the day, even," he thought, 
^'when Hamilton's company marched into 
Princeton. It was a model of discipline; at 
their head was a boy and I wondered at his 
youth. But what was my surprise when, 
struck with his slight figure, he was pointed 



THE GHOST THAT HAUNTED WALL STREET 125 

out to me as that Hamilton of whom we had 
already heard so much. A mere stripling, 
small, slender, almost delicate in frame, 
marching beside a piece of artillery, with a 
cocked hat pulled down over his eyes, ap- 
parently lost in thought, but every now and 
then patting the cannon as if it were a favorite 
horse or a pet plaything/^ 

Suddenly President Washington saw the 
final scene of his picture of Alexander Hamil- 
ton. 

''He used his last penny to equip his 
company^', he thought. 

Well, so had the colonies used their last 
resources too in their freedom. Which should 
triumph now, the ghost of poverty that 
stalked down there in the street and could 
cover with its fear the entire United States, 
or the spirit of financial courage as Alexander 
Hamilton had expressed it, as he had stood 
there beside his cannon? President Washing- 
ton knew as he raised his hand and the crov/d 
settled into silence to listen to our first 
inaugural address. The United States were 
not going into bankruptcy. Alexander Hamil- 



126 THE GHOST THAT HAUNTED WALL STREET 

ton, our first Secretary of the Treasury, was 
going to find a way out of our poverty. 

When your father comes home with his 
wages or salary in payment for the work of 
his hands or his mind, and when you know 
that this money will pay for your food and 
your home, your schooling and your happiness 
with some left over to put safely away in the 
bank at interest, it is hard to imagine how 
poor we were at the end of the American 
Revolution. We had no great manufacturing 
concerns for giving the people work and 
wages. We had only rather worthless pieces of 
paper for money that could pay for little here 
and less abroad. We had no national banking 
system such as makes possible now your buy- 
ing of Government bonds and thrift stamps. 
There was no mint for coining gold and silver 
into national currency. If we needed to buy 
foreign goods that we lacked, we could not 
pay for them and could hardly ask another 
nation to trust us, for we were not sure when 
we would be able to pay even our war debts. 

We not only owed money to foreign nations 
for the supplies we had needed to carry us 



THE GHOST THAT HAUNTED WALL STREET 127 

through the time of the Revolution, but we 
owed each other. Every state had its own 
debts to individuals in money that it had been 
obliged to borrow for general welfare. 

But we had the working gold back of us of a 
very bright, fine courage in our own worth, 
and we had a good financier to help us, the 
little boy of the West Indian counting house, 
grown to manhood and chosen by President 
Washington as the first Secretary of the 
United States Treasury. 

From the north to the south all the men of 
the country were anxious to get back to work 
after their long task of soldiering. The north 
wanted to build and manufacture and hunt. 
The south wanted to raise tobacco and cotton 
and rice once more. Here, in the work of 
men's hands, Alexander Hamilton saw, was a 
means of creating national wealth. He rec- 
ommended to the Congress that foreign 
merchants bringing or sending their goods to 
our shores should pay a certain amount for the 
privilege of selling them to us. That made 
American products a little cheaper and pro- 
tected the work of the New England shoe- 



128 THE GHOST THAT HAUNTED WALL STREET 

maker and the Virginia planter. If anyone 
wished a pair of French shppers or a dress of 
English print these could be had, but the pro- 
tective tariff that made them cost more gave 
the Government money to get out of debt. 
It accompHshed more than this. It helped 
to strengthen and increase American business. 

Alexander Hamilton's next step was to put 
real value back of the scraps of paper, dif- 
ferent kinds for almost every state in the 
Union, that we were trying to use for money. 
He transmitted to Congress a plan for having 
a central mint where precious metal should 
be coined, under the directions and control 
of the government, into real gold and silver 
money. The bank notes of the several state 
banks were given up and national banks were 
established with a uniform system of issuing 
bank notes, each one of which was a promise 
on the part of our nation to pay its full face 
value in gold or silver from the mint. 

We have had great iron factories and textile 
mills and locomotive works and shipbuilding 
yards and manufacturing concerns for turning 
out almost everything that we need from 



THE GHOST THAT HAUNTED WALL STREET 129 



needles to automobiles, shoes to toys, for so 
long that it is hard to think back to the old 
days after the American Revolution when 
we had none of these. We are so used to 
knowing that a crisp green dollar bill can be 
exchanged for as much as, or more than its 
home value in foreign money if we take a trip 
to Europe that it doesn't seem possible that 
there was once a ghost on Wall Street with 
empty pockets and debts. Presently, there 
was no ghost. We paid all that we owed 
foreign countries. There was never any 
question about our need of doing that. When 
it came to the states who had borrowed among 
themselves, Alexander Hamilton met diffi- 
culties. 

"Why should Georgia, who owes only a few 
hundred thousand dollars help to pay Massa- 
chusetts' debt of millions?'' the states asked. 

'There is only one kind of honesty," 
Alexander Hamilton repHed, "and it does not 
allow for repudiating any debt no matter how 
small. The states are a family and they are 
going to stand by each other until every 



130 THE GHOST THAT HAUNTED WALL STREET 

member has been helped to pay what it owes.'' 

That is exactly what we did. 

It was a great step forward in our progress 
as a free nation. Poverty and debt make a 
very real kind of ghost and the country that 
gets rid of them is better able to hold its head 
up, because it has cast away fear. A rich 
nation may be, also, a helpful nation. There 
came a time in our history when others who 
were our Allies needed our help and we were 
able to loan them the money they needed 
without question and without measure. 



THE ROAD THAT WENT OUT WEST 

''Look out, Dan! It's coming down the 
trail for you — not a squirrel, but a wildcat T' 
^ With this warning the boys of pioneer days 
in old Pennsylvania who had been out hunting 
with young Daniel Boone, scattered like so 
many scared rabbits and left the boy alone. 
All around him was the wilderness, untracked, 
a maze of deep forest and tangled underbrush. 
The Boones had a small log cabin not so far 
back with a clearing where they raised 
potatoes and corn, and Dan, who was about 
eleven years old, had started out that morning 
with his old fashioned musket over his 
shoulder, to shoot some squirrels for dinner. 
He wasn't afraid of anything and he liked 
nothing better than tramping a trail through 
the woods, but he was only a lad, and he 
could hear the dried branches crackle beneath 
the soft footsteps of this man killing beast. 

Dan did not move an inch. He waited there 



132 THE ROAD THAT WENT OUT WEST 

in the middle of the trail until he saw the 
yellow coat and green eyes of the wildcat 
showing against the hemlock and pine trees. 
Then he raised his gun, aimed, and pulled the 
trigger. 

At the sound of the shot, Dan's chums 
came running back, and they crowded around 
the dead wildcat where it lay beside him on 
the ground. 

^ ^Killed it with one shot! Hit it right in 
the heart!" they exclaimed, looking up then 
to tell Dan how plucky he had been, but the 
boy was not there. 

He had a kind of play shack farther on in 
the forest that he had built for himself of logs. 
He had gone there and was sitting in the door- 
way. A brave lad of the middle of our 
eighteenth century ..wearing a squirrel skin 
cap, a shirt and trousers and leggins of deer- 
skin, and holding his large, clumsy gun be 
tween his knees! J He was not looking back 
in the direction of the big game he had just 
bagged and his home. Dan Boone was look- 
ing forward through the wilderness, beyond 
and toward the west that had no road as yet. 



THE ROAD THAT WENT OUT WEST 133 

It was known only to wild beasts and to the 
most savage tribes of the American Indians; 
there were no settlements; it was a vast, 
unexplored, unmeasured place. Thinking of 
it, though, its adventure possibilities and its 
dangers, the boy's eyes shone. He stood up 
and lifted his musket as he looked westward. 
That was the place for him, he decided. He 
was going to, some day, start a wilderness 
road that would go west. 

In the year 1769, when he was still only a 
young man, Daniel Boone started out to open 
this westward road of his dreams. His only 
equipment was a little flour and salt, flint and 
tinder for making a camp fire, his gun, powder 
horn, shot pouch, tomahawk and scalping 
knife that hung from his belt. With a few 
friends he set off on foot on what he knew 
might be his greatest or his last adventure. 

Every day brought its hazards and sur- 
prises. The Colonies at that time clung to the 
Atlantic sea coast and no one knew the west 
except as an unexplored tract to which the 
savages had retreated from the march of the 
white man's civilization. Daniel Boone, 



134 THE ROAD THAT WENT OUT WEST 

tracking it, slept on dried leaves and bear- 
skins; his only shelter was a hollow tree, and 
he had to cut his way through man-high 
forest growth as he went. Boone's wilderness 
road was the longest, hardest, blackest trail 
of all our pioneer days. He and his men 
could not build a fire more than one night in 
one place, but had to creep on farther to 
escape the Indians. The black bear, cougar, 
and wolf followed them. They never knew 
whether it was a deer or a savage in wait for 
them at a game lick, the wild turkey's call or 
that of an Indian imitating it to lure them on 
to their death. 

But Daniel Boone was a mighty hunter and 
a man of gigantic courage. He kiUed bears 
and smoked their meat for bacon; as he pro- 
gressed he came to streams where wild duck 
could be shot, and still farther on toward the 
west he had glimpses of open spaces where 
wild cattle and buffaloes grazed. He was our 
first buffalo hunter and killed many, pickling 
the beef for his winter use in camp. He beat 
back the Indians and once, when he was 
surprised and taken prisoner by a hunting 




Boone's wilderness road was the longest, hardest, 
blackest trail of all our pioneer days. 



THE ROAD THAT WENT OUT WEST 135 

party, he escaped in the night and found his 
way back to his trail with padded footsteps 
like a panther's. 

Always, the wilderness road that Daniel 
Boone started went westward. It was a 
gloomy, hopeless way but Boone kept straight 
on from Pennsylvania through the wilds of 
Virginia and Tennessee, over mountains, 
fording streams and wading through swamps. 
It was not much more than a blazed foot path 
that he made, but suddenly it stopped. 
Daniel Boone saw before him the finish of his 
adventure; the narrow path opened upon a 
fair, smiling land, its groves pink with laurel 
and white with dogwood blossoms. The earth 
was fertile and green with pasturage, lying 
along the richest river valley America pos- 
sessed, the Kentucky Valley. In the year 
1775 Daniel Boone and his party built some 
rough hamlets here, surrounded by log stock- 
ades, and named the settlement Boones- 
borough. This was the beginning of the 
permanent settlement of Kentucky. 

It was not possible that so valiantly blazed 
a trail should stop. The colonists were an 



136 THE ROAD THAT WENT OUT WEST 

adventure loving people and they wanted to 
continue this westward road. Behind Daniel 
Boone came a peaceful army of thousands of 
settlers, marching and broadening his road 
with the wheel ruts their wagons made. They 
did not all stop in Kentucky, for they felt the 
spell and had dreams of the west which kept 
them moving. As early as the year 1788 this 
notice was posted in one of the frontier settle- 
ments of Kentucky: 

"A large company will meet at the Crab 
Orchard the 19th of November in order to 
start the next day through the wilderness. 
As it is very dangerous on account of the 
Indians, it is hoped each person will go well 
armed." 

So the prairie schooners, great, clumsy 
wagons with a covering of thick canvas or 
blankets started west. The men and boys 
rode ahead on horseback to break a trail, and 
the mothers and little ones were crowded 
inside the schooner with a supply of bedding, 
food, tools, and dishes. They had to carry, 
too, a spinning wheel and a loom, a cook 
stove, seeds for the spring planting, a supply 



THE ROAD THAT WENT OUT WEST 137 

of healing and medicinal herbs in case the 
children should be ill, the family Bible and the 
year's almanac. Sometimes a cow would 
be tied to the back of the wagon and the 
cackling of hens would come from inside the 
wagon. The way was still a trackless wilder- 
ness. Each day brought the dread that the 
covering of the wagon might be pierced in a 
dozen places by the arrows of the Indians, and 
each night these western emigrants rested 
within hearing of the calls of coyotes and 
panthers. 

But there came always some sunrise on the 
plains when a prairie schooner stopped. Or 
perhaps the sun rose for them in the timber 
land near a great lake with a trout stream 
running through a gully and plenty of game 
to be had in the woods. A fire was built on 
the edge of the stream and coffee made and 
fish cooked on hot stones. That was one of 
the first hearth fires of the west. A claim 
of land was staked out by driving in stumps 
at its boundaries, the wagon was unloaded 
and the family lived in a tent until their 
log house was put up. Everybody helped to 



138 THE ROAD THAT WENT OUT WEST 

clear and plow the land and put in the seed- 
grain. 

Here was the second station on the western 
road, where wheel tracks stopped and a farm 
began. 

Did the road end at this farm? Not a bit 
of it. It went right on, farther west all the 
time and marked now by the hoof prints of 
cattle and horses and sheep. It was the 
middle of the nineteenth century and the 
western trail was much broader, taking its 
way through open prairie lands where the 
cattle ranger who was blazing the trail 
pitched his camp uiider the stars at night. 
He was up and on at daybreak, though, his 
face turned westward as he drove his herds 
toward the place of plenty he felt the road 
would lead him to. The herd was lean, 
active, muscular, broad of horn and fierce. 
It took skilful riding and driving to keep the 
cows together, but they gave great promise 
for the nation in producing food, hides and 
leather. 

At last this herdsman, too, stopped. He 
had come to a land with springs in the hills 



THE ROAD THAT WENT OUT WEST 139 

and ridges and woods for shelter. There was 
unmeasured pasturage of buffalo grass and 
black corn for the herd. The herdsman, with 
other cattle rangers who joined him, made a 
great log corral for the animals and mounted 
guns at the corners to keep off mountain 
lions and grizzhes. They built themselves a 
house of thick pine boards with one great 
room, their bunks ranged around the sides 
and the walls hung with their saddles, bridles 
and ropes. They built a great cook house, 
too, with a long table in the centre flanked 
by benches, and a tin plate and cup for each 
man. The door of their main building was 
twice as thick as the walls and made of 
unmatched, unplaned boards. At any time 
an arrow or a bullet might imbed itself near 
the latch. 

That was the third station on the western 
road, where hoof prints had led the way in the 
early eighties, to our first ranch. 

Still the road went on. Pony hoofs were 
marking it now. A man equipped for a new 
kind of work mounted a wiry little horse and 
rode westward. He wore rough, serviceable 



140 THE ROAD THAT WENT OUT WEST 

clothes, a slouch hat and high, stout boots. 
He carried, in a pack, and hung from his 
saddle a frying pan, a small iron pot, a knife, 
fork and spoon, some bacon, flour, salt, beans, 
a few candles, a shovel and a pick. At last 
his trail stopped at the foot of a mountain 
with a glimpse of the blue sea to be had from 
its top. 

The man lost no time in getting to work. 
He pitched camp where a stream flowed down 
the mountain and began mining. He thought 
that it might, also, be a good plan to utilize 
the water power, so he got help from other 
pioneer trail riders who followed him and 
built a saw mill at the foot of the mountain, 
made a dam, dug the race and put the gates 
in place. He turned the water into the race 
one day to carry away some of the loose dirt 
and gravel and then turned it off again. A 
short time later he saw some shining yellow 
particles lying on the bed rock of the mill 
race and picked them up to look at them. 
They were bright, smooth, and the size of 
wheat grains. He put a few of these strange 
bits of metal in his kitchen fire and saw that 



THE ROAD THAT WENT OUT WEST 141 

they did not lose their yellow color. He 
pounded them and found that they were 
malleable. Then this miner had an idea. 
He took a gold coin from his pocket and 
compared it with the metal he had discovered. 
Then he could hardly believe the wonder that 
his eyes showed him. 

That was where the western road ended, 
at a gold mine in CaHfornia in the year 1848. 

It had been a Icng, brave way of progress 
for the American people, a trail two thousand 
miles along the eastern edge of the Rocky 
Mountains, then hundreds of miles away 
across plains and flowered prairies. It covered 
what were later the vast states of Texas, 
Kansas, Wyoming and Montana. It went as 
far west as Utah, Nevada and bent back to 
the fertile lands of Missouri, Iowa and 
Illinois. It would have liked to go on always, 
but the best that it could do when it reached 
California, was to turn around and come 
back east. 

It is a triumphant way that the road takes 
back. Shining steel rails carrying great 
locomotives, passenger and freight trains 



142 THE ROAD THAT WENT OUT WEST 

cover the old wheel ruts and hoof prints. 
Steamboats cross the rivers and lakes where 
there were only fords in those early days. 

Gold and silver are brought over it to our 
national mints, coal for our factories, public 
works, schools and homes, timber, iron, copper 
and lead for our own manufacturing and 
building and to supply the Old World as well. 

The road steaming back east passes the 
place where the lonely rar.chman corraled his 
herd. It is a thousand miles of ranches now 
with cattle and sheep that cannot be counted 
and huge cities built in their midst for prepar- 
ing and packing and shipping the meat and 
leather and wool they yield to our people and 
our neighbors across the sea. The little, poor 
farm where the plucky prairie schooner 
stopped has spread and enriched itself until 
it covers millions of acres of fertile grain and 
orchard land where our flour, cereals, apples, 
oranges, peaches and grapes are ripening to 
feed us and the world when it asks us for food. 
Schools and colleges, the chimneys of great 
factories, lights from homestead windows 
where immigrants who have come to our 



THE ROAD THAT WENT OUT WEST 143 

shores to be free Americans live, forests of 
timber for every kind of building, deep oil 
wells, vast parks where our little brothers in 
feathers and fur live in peace and freedom, 
these too mark the way of one of the greatest 
roads in history — our road that went out west. 



IN THE WAKE OF THE FIRST 
STEAMBOAT 

When Robert Fulton was a boy in Lan- 
caster, Pennsylvania, they called him Quick- 
silver Bob and it was a very good nickname 
for him.% He not only collected just as much 
of that strange, fascinating metal as he could 
to experiment with, but he was somewhat 
like quicksilver himself, bright and active, 
never content to stay long in one place, but 
anxious to go farther on and do something 
that would be important and essential. 

The war for American independence was 
almost over and we were already a very busy 
people. The Colonies were thinking about 
making themselves over for peace and wider 
farming and bigger business. They were 
trying to cut loose from their old, slow way 
of doing things. Manufacturing on a small 
scale was beginning and the spirit of invention 
was everywhere. 



IN THE WAKE OF THE FIRST STEAMBOAT 145 

There was an ammunition factory in Lan- 
caster where guns for the Continental army- 
were made and Bob Fulton in his teens had 
the run of it. The workmen liked him. There 
was a Hessian prison camp in Lancaster, and 
Bob amused the munition workers in the noon 
hour by making quaint, life-Uke sketches of 
these German soldiers. He wanted, in return, 
to be allowed to see the working drawings for 
guns and learn just what kind of mechanism 
was needed for carrying bullets a given 
distance. No one minds having a bright boy 
who is really interested in a man's work 
around, so Bob spent a good deal of time at the 
gun factory and learned more than he ever 
could have in school about machinery. 

He was an outdoor lad, also, and loved to 
go fishing. One could step from the main 
street of Lancaster right into a forest wilder- 
ness in those days, splendid for sport because 
the mountains sent down countless trout 
brooks in every direction, but slow trailing 
for the fisherman. A hundred years before 
a boy would have done the best he could in 
cutting a trail through the woods to his fishing 



146 IN THE WAKE OF THE FIRST STEAMBOAT 

hole, but our point of view was now changed. 
Bob Fulton put his mind to work trying to 
find some quicker mode of travel that would 
not only save his time and win for him a 
longer string of fish, but would do the same 
for other boys. So he got together what scrap 
materials and tools he could find and he built 
a new kind of a boat. 

Up to that time navigation by water had 
been a slow mode of travel. One had to wait 
for a favorable wind to fill the sails, or carry- 
food stuffs and other necessaries in a drifting 
scow or canoe. But Quicksilver Bob had an 
idea about water locomotion. He built a 
wheel that combined the usefulness of several 
sets of oars or paddles and attached it to the 
side of his boat. By working this paddle 
wheel with his hands the lad was able to travel 
down a river for a fishing trip much more 
quickly than any boy ever had before. 

Everybody liked Bob Fulton. They did 
not pay very much attention to his boat, for 
it was an awkward, clumsy sort of craft, 
difficult to steer and apt to get stuck in low 
water, but they were interested in the boy 



IN THE WAKE OF THE FIRST STEAMBOAT 147 



himself who continually surprised them with 
his inventions. 

As he grew from boyhood to manhood he 
did anything at hand to earn money for the 
materials he needed for his tinkering. He 
drew plans for machinery, designed houses 
and the family coaches which were quite 
elaborate in those days, and he painted signs 
for the inns and taverns on the Lancaster 
post road. Between times he experimented 
with a machine for cutting marble, one for 
spinning flax, a contrivance for twisting rope 
and an earth scoop for digging canals and 
helping with irrigation. All the time, though, 
Robert Fulton's eyes were on the water and 
his hands touched, in his imagination, a 
propeller. 

An Englishman, James Watt, had made a 
valuable discovery not so many years before. 
He had found out that a tea kettle of boiling 
water was good for something more than 
making a cup of tea. There was power enough 
in the steam generated by the water to force 
off the cover of the tea kettle, and by using 
this new found steam power in a large way. 



148 IN THE WAKE OF THE FIRST STEAMBOAT 

James Watt had been able to build a high 
pressure engine in which a piston, moved by 
the force of steam, pushed a wheel and made 
it revolve. This was the beginning of the 
steam engine upon whose perfection men 
were putting great hopes. There was need 
in England of finding a new way of working 
the coal mines and of transporting the coal 
to market. It had to be hauled from the pit 
of the colliery to a shipping place, and it was 
heavy and of great bulk. James Watt was 
building steam engines early in the nineteenth 
century to carry the coal from the mine, and 
other inventors were working on a plan for 
moving it along level ground, also by steam 
power. 

Robert Fulton watched and studied the 
development of the steam engine. Suddenly 
his great idea came and he returned to 
America. 

New York was a young giant in those days 
with feet firmly planted on the docks that 
were beginning to line the seaboard, and 
hands stretching up the Hudson and west, 
even, for the grain and ore and skins that 



IN THE WAKE OF THE FIRST STEAMBOAT 14 9 

Europe was asking for and which the colonies 
also needed. It still had a green post road 
and clustering farms along a bowery way 
whose gardens divided the town like a brightly 
colored ribbon, but the lanes were broadening 
into highways, and the buildings were a 
story higher now. New York had begun to 
have suburbs, too. There was the Spitting 
Devil, a little north of the Broad Way, so 
called because the river beat and frothed 
so against its banks at that point. There was 
also Greenwich Village on the North River 
where all sorts of people were to be seen on 
the wharf, from Dutch traders smoking their 
long pipes to an occasional red face, still brave 
in his paint and feathers. 

There was an especially large and motley 
crowd of onlookers along the Greenwich 
Village wharf one summer afternoon in the 
year 1807. It was the seventeenth day of 
August and it seemed as if every house in the 
Village and every tavern and shop had emptied 
itself. The traders and farmers were talking 
to each other about some expected event and 
their comments differed. Some were anxious, 



150 IN THE WAKE OF THE FIRST STEAMBOAT 

others were making a joke of it, and the 
Indians were apprehensive. 

^1 have seen Fulton's Folly/' a canny 
Dutchman said, between cloudy puffs from 
his pipe. ^^She looks for all the world like a 
back woods saw mill perched up on a scow 
and set on fire.'' 

Two Indian hunters trembled as they spoke 
to each other and looked down the North 
River: 

"A monster moving on the waters, fighting 
the winds and tides and breathing fire and 
smoke" one of them said. Then they fell to 
their knees, praying for deliverance, and the 
other men crowded to the edge of the wharf 
until they almost pushed each other off, for 
the expected was about to happen. The 
smoking, fiery monster came slowly up the 
North River like some old world dragon, 
walking the waters. Fulton's Folly was in 
sight. 

It was a boat without sails, clumsy beyond 
description, and having exposed machinery 
that groaned and creaked with every turn of 
the paddle wheels. These wheels splashed 



IN THE WAKE OF THE FIRST STEAMBOAT 151 

about so much that they reminded one of the 
Spitting Devil farther on, and the tiller was 
not very well placed for steering. Pine wood, 
which was being used for fuel, sent a shower 
of sparks shooting up into the sky whenever 
the fire was stirred. 

But the boat moved, as no boat had before 
in the Hudson, without the aid of man^s 
hands to push her, or the winds of heaven to 
fill her sails. On the deck stood a man, tall 
and straight, the air from the hills blowing his 
dark hair back from his high forehead, and 
his deep, far seeing eyes set on the course up 
the Hudson he was taking. It was Robert 
Fulton, who had invented and built our first 
steamboat which was to be copied by all the 
nations and work wonders in making travel 
quicker and transportation of necessities to 
the uttermost parts of the earth possible. 

This first steamboat was called the Cler- 
mont, and she made her first trip from New 
York to Albany that long ago August day 
successfully under her own steam. Robert 
Fulton had built her a boiler of the same 
pattern that Watts used in his steam engines 



152 IN THE WAKE OF THE FIRST STEAMBOAT 

and set in masonry. There was only a short 
deck and the engine was open to view. Back 
of the engine there was a kind of cabin such 
as we use now on a canal boat and this 
sheltered the boiler and had a room for the 
ship's captain and engineer. The old saiHng 
packet rudder was used, moved on a tiller, 
and the boat was very unwieldy. The Cler- 
mont had the heart of the ocean Hner of today, 
however; she moved under the power and 
control of steam. 

Robert Fulton was quick to improve her 
mechanism and in a short time she was 
making regular trips up the Hudson and back, 
carrying passengers and freight. Every 
throb of this long-ago little steam boat's 
engine was a promise of the future greatness 
of the American people. 

She was going to deepen her hold and 
broaden her deck until she was able to carry 
tools and building materials to the west along 
the great waterways of America and bring 
back grains and ore. She was the intrepid 
younger sister of every colossal American 
steamship launched since her day and uniting 



IN T HE WAKE OF THE FIRST STEAMBOAT 153 

US with the other nations of the world by- 
transporting our manufactured goods, our 
food and our men to whoever needs them. 



CUTTING THE WORLD'S BREAD 

Cyrus McCormick's great grandfather had 
been an Indian fighter in the colony of Penn- 
sylvania. His grandfather had moved to 
Virginia and fought in the Revolution, and 
his father had built a log house and tilled a 
farm in that strip of arable Virginia land that 
lay between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghany 
Mountains. 

He prospered until he added two neighbor- 
ing farms to the original one; he had two 
grist mills, two saw mills, a blacksmith shop, 
and a smelting furnace. The McCormick 
house and farm was almost a small village 
in itself. There were eight children, and 
their shoes were cobbled, their clothes woven 
and their beds and chairs and tables were 
made, and well made too, at home. What- 
ever was needed could be done; the family 
was always busy within doors or without, 
and the spirit of invention was in the air. Here 

copyright 

George W. Jacobs & Company, Philadelphia 

all rights reserved 



CUTTING TPIE WORLD'S BREAD 155 

in the year 1809, Cyrus McCormick was born. 

He went to one of the Old Field Schools, so 
called because it was built on ground that had 
been abandoned for farm use. He learned 
what other boys and girls were learning in 
country schools at that time, but he studied 
harder than most of them, because he had a 
keen desire to understand thoroughly what- 
ever subject he started. At eighteen he began 
studying surveying, and soon won a good 
reputation in the neighborhood as an engineer. 
Much of his time he spent in the fields with 
his father, and here he soon learned that 
reaping wheat was no easy task, and that 
swinging a wheat cradle under the summer 
sun was hard on both the temper and the 
back. 

The world up to this time had cut its bread, 
in the grain, by hand, a slow, laborious way. 
This boy on the McCormick farm who had 
been brought up to tackle any job that the 
day brought, from drawing a map to resoling 
his shoes, decided to try and solve the problem 
of how to harvest wheat by machine. 

There were some almost unsurmountable 



156 CUTTING THE WORLD'S BREAD 

difficulties that faced him in this task. There 
was the problem of how to separate the grain 
that was to be cut from that which was to 
be left standing. His father had built a 
machine that would cut but left the wheat 
after cutting in a badly tangled shape. Cyrus 
saw that this was not efficient. A reaper to 
be of real use must dispose of the grain prop- 
erly as well as shear the stalks. He finally 
added a curved arm, or divider, to the end of 
his reaper's blade. In this way the grain that 
was to be cut could be properly fed to the 
knife. 

But the grain was apt to be badly tangled 
before the reaper reached it, and Cyrus wanted 
his machine to be able to cut the stalks that 
were pressed to the ground and out of shape 
as well as it cut the straight stalks. He 
decided that his reaping blade must have two 
motions, one a forward cut, and the other 
sideways. He tried countless plans before he 
finally hit upon the right one. It was a 
straight knife blade that moved forward and 
backward, cutting with each motion. 

Yet, even though the reaper could divide 



CUTTING THE WORLD'S BREAD 157 

the grain properly and the knife cut with a 
double motion, there was still the danger that 
the blade might simply press the grain down 
and so slide over it. That was very apt to be 
the case after a rain, or when the grain had 
been badly blown about by the wind. The 
problem now was how to hold it upright. 
Cyrus discovered how to do this by adding 
a row of indentations that projected a few 
inches from the edge of the knife and acted 
like fingers in catching the wheat stalks and 
holding them in place to be cut. 

These three ideas, the divider, the blade 
that would work backward or forward and 
the fingers, met the question of how the grain 
was to be cut. To these Cyrus added a re- 
volving reel that would lift any grain that had 
fallen and straighten it, and a platform to 
catch the grain as it was cut and fell. His 
idea was that a man should walk along be- 
side the reaper and rake off the grain as it 
fell upon the platform. Two more devices, 
and his first reaper was completed. One was 
to have the shafts placed on the outside so 
that the horse would pull it sideways. The 



158 CUTTING THE WORLD'S BREAD 

other was to have the whole machine operated 
by one large wheel that bore the weight and 
moved the knife and the reel. 

It had taken young McCormick a good 
many months to work out all these problems 
and there were only one or two weeks each 
year, the harvest weeks, when he could 
actually try his reaper. He wanted to have 
it ready for a final test the spring when he was 
twenty-two years old, but the work of getting 
all the parts together was very great. He 
begged his father, though, to leave a small 
patch of wheat for him to try to cut, and at 
last, in the early summer, he drove his 
cumbersome machine into the field. 

All his family watched as the reaper headed 
toward the grain. They saw the wheat 
gathered and swept down upon the knife, 
they saw the blade move back and forth and 
cut the grain, and then saw it fall on the little 
platform. The machine worked not nearly 
so smoothly or so fast as it should, but it did 
work. It gathered the grain in and it left it 
in good shape to be raked off the platform. 
The young inventor drove it proudly back 



CUTTING THE WORLD'S BREAD 159 

to his workshop and made certain changes 
in the reel and in the divider. Then, several 
days later, he drove it over to the little settle- 
ment of Steele's Tavern and cut six acres of 
oats in one afternoon. That was a marvelous 
feat and caused great wonder throughout the 
entire countryside. 

At that time labor was very scarce in the 
great central region of our country and the 
farms were enormous. The wheat was going 
to waste, for there were not enough scythes 
and sickles to cut it. Cyrus McCormick 
believed that every farm needed one of his 
reapers, but it had taken all his savings to 
build the first one, and it was not until 1840 
that a stranger rode up to his door and offered 
to pay him fifty dollars for a reaper. But he 
had faith, and worked on the farm to earn 
money for more materials and he patented 
his reaper. Then he discovered a small 
deposit of iron ore in the neighborhood and 
built himself a furnace and began to make 
iron. His log workshop became a factory on 
a small scale, and orders for reapers at higher 
prices began to come in from the farms in the 



160 CUTTING THE WORLD'S BREAD 

far west. The little home factory was being 
pushed to the utmost. 

Chicago in 1847 was still not much more 
than a frontier town. It had fought gamely 
with floods and droughts, cholera and panics, 
pirates and land thieves. But it was bound 
to grow, for railroads would have to come to 
bring the wheat and others to carry it away. 
Cyrus McCormick needed a central point for 
building his reapers and shipping them. He 
studied this matter with the greatest care, 
and finally decided that the best place was 
the little town of Chicago, lying on a great 
lake, and halfway between the western wheat 
fields and the mills and docks of the eastern 
seaboard. 

He had to borrow money to move his 
machinery and set up manufacturing in 
Chicago, but he knew that this hazard was 
part of the game. 

Cyrus McCormick was not only an inven- 
tor, but a business builder, one of those great 
pioneers in the field of United States manu- 
facturing that was, later to make our nation 
so essential and far reaching in its influence 



CUTTING THE WORLD'S BREAD 161 

on the world. He knew he had a machine 
that would lessen labor and increase wealth 
wherever wheat was grown, and he felt that 
it was his work to see that the reaper did its 
share in speeding the progress of the world. 

Just as he had studied the problem 
of cutting wheat, so he studied now the pro- 
blem of selling his reapers in such a way that 
every farmer should own one. He believed 
in advertising, and he had some posters 
printed with a picture of the reaper at the 
top and underneath a statement telling just 
what the machine would do. There was a 
space beneath this for the signature of the 
farmer who bought it, and the man who sold 
it, and two witnesses beside. The price of a 
reaper was now one hundred and twenty dol- 
lars. The farmer paid part of this down and 
the balance at the end of six months, provided 
the reaper would cut one and a half acres an 
hour. This guarantee, with the chance to 
have the money back if the reaper proved a 
failure, was a new idea and seemed to the 
farmers an honorable way of doing business. 
More th^ this, Cyrus McCormick printed 



162 CUTTING THE WORLD'S BREAD 

in newspapers and farm journals, letters he 
had received from farmers telling what their 
reapers were doing for them. 

In these new ways, the foundation of an 
enormous business was laid. 

So important an invention as the reaper was 
certain to need improvements, but for a 
number of years the only additions were seats 
for the driver and the raker. How to bind the 
grain was more difficult. McCormick was 
deep in the study of this when a man named 
Withington came to him from Wisconsin and 
said that he had a machine for binding grain. 
He showed it to McCormick, two steel arms, 
which would catch each bundle of grain, pass 
a wire about it, and twist the ends of the wire, 
cut it loose and throw the sheaf on the ground. 
Cyrus McCormick bought the rights to manu- 
facture the binder in connection with his 
reaper and tried it on a farm near Chicago. 
It worked perfectly, cutting fifty acres of 
wheat and binding it into sheaves. 

At last only one person was needed to 
harvest the wheat, the one who sat on the 
driver's seat and had, simply, to guide the 



CUTTING THE WORLD'3 BREAD 103 

horses. A boy could do all the work of 
harvesting that it had taken a score of men 
to do twenty years before. 

The reaper was needed, first, in America 
because farm labor was scarce and the wheat 
fields enormously fertile. We would never 
have been able to open the west as soon as we 
did if men had been obliged to cut grain by 
hand as they did at first. Cyrus McCormick, 
through his invention, was one of the builders 
of our nation and he also helped us to help 
other nations get their daily bread. 

Before long the American reaper began to 
whir in the wide wheat fields of European 
Russia and Liberia, in Germany and France 
and in the Slavic countries, in India, and in 
the Argentine. Today we can be heard 
reaping wherever in the world there is grain 
to be cut. The reaper made the output of 
grain many times what it had been before 
and it had its part in our development as a 
great, free people. Wherever an invention 
is able to release man's hands for more skilled 
uses a step forward in national progress has 
been taken. 



WHEN JOHNNY BULL AND BROTHER 
JONATHAN SHOOK HANDS 

The Knickerbocker folk who lived in Wash- 
ington Square near the New York University 
in the early eighties would have told you that 
either a toymaker or a magician had a work- 
shop there in the University building. Almost 
any one could have repeated something weird 
and unusual about Mr. Samuel Morse, who 
went into the building early in the morning, 
began tinkering in the room he had rented 
there and sometimes did not go home until 
the man who lighted the street lamps came 
along with his torch and ladder. 

Mr. Morse had patronized the small shops 
that hung out their signs along the edges of 
Washington Square and had bought many 
different kinds of materials for his work. 
Among these were the wheels of an old wooden 
clock, a wooden pendulum, some bees wax, a 
great deal of wire from the milliner who made 



JOHNNY BULL AND BROTHER JONATHAN 165 

bonnet frames, some carpet binding, an 
electro magnet, an old picture frame and 
other things as old and apparently useless. 

A few persons who had been inside Mr. 
Morse's workroom in the University described 
it as an uncanny kind of place. They said 
that there were wires suspended there, extend- 
ing from one end of the room to the other and 
returning many times until they covered 
a length of several hundred feet. The electro 
magnet was fastened in the wooden picture 
frame, set up vertically and connected with 
the wires. In front of the magnet was a 
wooden lever or arm jBtted so that it would 
hold a pencil in the end. What could be the 
meaning of this attempt at invention? Mr. 
Morse was known to have been very much 
interested in electricity when he was a boy 
at Yale College. He felt that it could be 
made to accomphsh wonders for the world. 
But what was he doing with it up there among 
his cobweb lines of wires? 

At last not even the lamp lighter saw Mr. 
Morse at supper time, because he was living 
in his workroom and even sleeping there. 



166 JOHNNY BULL AND BROTHER JONATHAN 

He seemed to be very poor, the groceryman 
who sold him his supplies said, for he bought 
his food in such small quantities. Sounds of a 
metallic tapping issued from his room, and it 
was said that the pencil he had attached to his 
magnet could make zigzag markings on paper 
without the aid of human hands. The whole 
matter was amazing and might have been set 
down as being of a part with sorcery but for 
the fact that Mr. Morse left New York at 
last with his materials and went to Washing- 
ton. 

The Congress was sitting in Washington 
in December of the year 1842 with a great deal 
of business in its hands. The United States 
was making money and spending money and 
this particular session of the Congress was 
trying to vote wisely on its last day on over 
one hundred different bills. Some of the 
lawmakers had seen Mr. Morse's ingenious 
electrical toy four years before when he had 
exhibited it there and asked the Congress to 
appropriate some money so that he might 
perfect it, but none of them had much faith 
in the wizardry he believed he had invented. 




Before the representatives of George III, stood 
Benjamin Franklin, our first American 
Diplomatist. 



JOHNNY BULL AND BROTHER JONATHAN 167 

Still Mr. Morse kept appealing to the Congress 
forlielp, and one of the bills before it on this 
special day had to do with his magnets and 
wires and strange tappings. 

Samuel Morse, himself, sat in the gallery 
listening to the voting of the Congress until 
it was evening. There was little use of his 
doing anything else for he would have less 
than a dollar when he paid his hotel bill. One 
after another the bills before it were voted 
on by the Congress and at last Mr. Morse left. 
He had decided to give up this dream that he 
had for his country. 

But the next morning news was brought to 
him that just before it adjourned. Congress 
had voted thirty thousand dollars^ to test and 
develop his invention — the electric telegraph. 

Then there was excitement throughout the 
States. If Samuel Morse's telegraph idea 
worked, news would travel like lightning. 
The postrider, the pony express, the railroad 
train and the steamboat would all be out- 
distanced. The mills of New England where 
calico was made could hear almost instantly 
what to expect from the South in the way of 



168 JOHNNY BULL AND BROTHER JONATHAN 

cotton crops. A family living in Boston or 
Philadelphia could have quick word of the 
safe arrival of the boy who went out to Cali- 
fornia to the mines. Such dangers as train 
robberies, railroad accidents, fires, sudden 
illness, floods and devastating storms could 
be reported at once and aid sent. The tele- 
graph would bring the states together in a way 
that no one had dreamed of their being 
united before. Could such wonders be ac- 
complished though? That was the question, 
and the American people went to work to 
find out. 

Samuel Morse had discovered that there 
was almost no limit to the distance which 
electricity will travel along a wire. He had 
also invented a system of breaking this 
electric current at certain points on his wires 
and producing a spark. He thought that a 
spark might stand for a letter in the alphabet, 
and the absence of a spark for another letter. 
The length of the space between the sparks 
might indicate still a third letter. In this way 
he had built an alphabet which his pencil 
in the old New York workshop had 



JOHNNY BULL AND BROTHER JONATHAN 169 

recorded automatically by means of signs, and 
the transmission of messages, unseen, by wire 
had been invented. 

An overhead telegraph line of wires strung 
on poles was constructed between Washington 
and Baltimore. There was an electrical 
sending battery at one end and a receiving 
battery at the other. Through the help of 
Mr. Alfred Vail, a friend of Samuel Morse, 
the method of sending messages by telegraph 
was improved. Dots and dashes of varying 
lengths were used to indicate the letters and 
these were recorded on paper by a sharp 
pointed piece of metal instead of by a pencil, 
making the message more permanent. At 
last this first, crude telegraph line was com- 
pleted and the first message was transmitted 
on May 24, 1844 from Washington to Balti- 
more. 

It was this: 

^^What hath God wrought?'' 

The words were received in Baltimore 
successfully. The mystery of Samuel Morse's 
Washington Square junk shop had become 
the reality of the telegraph. It was going to 



170 JOHNNY BULL AND BROTHER JONATHAN 

weld together, by its unseen power, families 
and friends who were separated, far distant 
states, nations thousands of miles apart, 
bring almost instantaneous news of war and 
of peace, of danger, and of success and 
happiness. 

Since the American people had begun play- 
ing wizard in this wonderful way of sending 
messages from one to another by electricity, 
they decided that more marvels could be 
accomplished. Why not have an under-sea 
telegraph, Mr. Cyrus W. Field thought, that 
would make it possible for the Old World 
to talk to the New just as the states could 
talk to each other? That was a great thought 
and a daring venture, for England and 
America were separated by thousands of 
miles of deep, stormy ocean. 

England wanted to help, though. She was 
interested in the man-size nation that had 
grown up from her fighting apprentice, the 
American Colonies, and she thought that a 
fine way of getting better acquainted would 
be this Atlantic cable which Mr. Field, an 



JOHNNY BULL AND BROTHER JONATHAN 171 

American business man, believed could be 
laid. 

There were great difficulties in preparing a 
wire that could be placed at the bottom of 
the ocean. It had to be a particularly heavy 
kind of wire securely wrapped up in gutta 
percha bound with tape and yarn, brass and 
tarred hemp, and over all these coverings 
coils of stout wire had to be wound to protect 
the cable from the rocks. England supplied 
two ships and the United States two, and 
Mr. Field crossed the ocean thirty times in 
making arrangements for this gigantic enter- 
prise of trying to lay the cable. 

If the first ships setting out from England, 
their decks loaded with these great coils of 
heavy wires, had been successful in placing 
the cable safely at the bottom of the ocean, 
this story would not be so exciting. If.the 
second expedition had not broken the cable 
and nearly lost its ships, we would not have 
had another story about two nations that 
never like to give up. It was the third 
expedition, though, that made historyf Four 
ships, two English and two American, met in 



172 JOHNNY BULL AND BROTHER JONATHAN 

the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. There, 
midway between the nations, they spliced 
the cable, dropped it, and started on their 
perilous routes back, two ships going to 
Great Britain and two to America, laying the 
cable as they went. It was almost as if we 
had shaken hands with England out there in 
mid-ocean. 

One day in the summer of the year 1858, 
the President of the United States, James 
Buchanan, received the first cablegram that 
had ever been sent to our country. It made 
its way by electricity along the successfully 
laid Atlantic cable under the deep seas and 
among the rocks of all those miles of ocean. 
It was sent by Queen Victoria of England 
to us and it read: 

'^The Queen desires to congratulate the 
President upon the successful completion of 
this great work, in which the Queen has taken 
the deepest interest. 

^The Queen is convinced that the President 
will join with her in fervently hoping that the 
electric cable which now connects Great 
Britain with the United States will prove an 




There, midway between the nations, they spliced 
the cable. 



JOHNNY BULL AND BROTHER JONATHAN 173 

additional link between the nations whose 
friendship is founded upon their common 
interest and reciprocal esteem. 

*The Queen has much pleasure in thus 
communicating with the President and renew- 
ing to him her wishes for the prosperity of the 
United States/' 

It was a very great day for us and every- 
body felt like taking a holiday and celebrating, 
just as we do sometimes now. Work stopped 
in all the Government buildings at Washing- 
ton and the city was red, white and blue for 
the day. They were laying out Central Park 
in New York City, but the workmen put their 
spades and rakes over their shoulders and had 
a parade down Broadway. Out in the western 
cities they rang the church bells, fired cannon, 
and burned barrels of tar at the street corners. 
Torchlight processions were held everywhere 
that evening, and the people who marched 
carried transparencies that were very popular 
at that time. They were made in box shape 
of oiled paper, lettered, lighted inside and 
strung on poles. One of these transparencies 
had a very important message about the 



174 JOHNNY BULL AND BROTHER JONATHAN 

newly laid Atlantic cable, even if it was a 
kind of joke. It read: 

'^Lightning Caught and Tamed by 
Benjamin Franklin. Taught to Read and 
Write and go on errands by Samuel Morse. 
Started in the Foreign Trade by Field, Cooper 
and Co., with Johnny Bull and Brother 
Jonathan as Special Partners.'^ 

There were, of course, delays and dis- 
couragements in perfecting our telegraph and 
cable systems. The Civil War interfered, 
because a fight to disrupt the Union pre- 
vented all these steps for bringing the states 
closer together. But in a few years there was 
a telegraph line built and in use that spanned 
the entire North American Continent and we 
had also united Great Britain and the United 
States so successfully that the Atlantic cable 
was in constant use. 

Slowly but steadily the giant trees of our 
American forests left their centuries old home 
in the woods to take their places along new 
roads and hold the network of telegraph 
wires that were charged every minute, night 
and day, with our nation's messages. Tele- 



JOHNNY BULL AND BROTHER JONATHAN 175 

graph offices were built, not only in our large 
cities, but wherever the railroad stopped. 
A new American, the telegraph operator, took 
his place in each telegraph office with a key 
board in front of him on which to send and 
receive messages that flashed in a few minutes 
across distances covered so slowly in the 
former years by the man on horseback and the 
stage coach. 

The telegraph and the cable quickened 
American business. It made American life 
safer and closer. The greatest thing it did, 
though, was to unite Johnny Bull and Brother 
Jonathan, Uncle Sam's elder brother, in a 
s'pecial kind of partnership which they had not 
shared before. 



A SLAVE AMONG SLAVES 

I was born a slave on a plantation in 
Franklin County, Virginia. As nearly as I 
have been able to learn, I was born near a 
crossroad's post office called Hale's Ford, 
and the year was 1858 or 1859. 

My life had its beginning in the midst of 
most desolate and discouraging surroundings. 
This was not because my owners were especial- 
ly cruel, for they were not, as compared with 
many others. I began life in a log cabin 
about fourteen by sixteen feet square. In 
this cabin I lived with my brother and sister 
till after the Civil War, when we were all 
declared free. 

The cabin was not only our living place, 
but was also used as the kitchen for the 
plantation. My mother was the plantation 
cook. The cabin was without glass windows; 
it had only openings in the side which let in 
the light, and also the cold, chilly air of winter. 



A SLAVE AMONG SLAVES 177 

There was a door to the cabin — that is, some- 
thing that was called a door — ^but the un- 
certain hinges by which it was hung, and the 
large cracks in it, to say nothing of the fact 
that it was too small, made the room a very 
uncomfortable one. There was no wooden 
floor in our cabin, the naked earth being used 
as a floor. In the centre of the earthen floor 
there was a large, deep opening covered with 
boards, which was used as a place for storing 
sweet potatoes during the winter. There was 
no cooking-stove on our plantation, and all 
the cooking for the whites and the slaves my 
mother had to do over an open fireplace, and 
mostly in pots and skillets. 

The early years of my life were not very 
different from those of thousands of other 
slaves. My mother snatched a few moments 
for our care in the early morning before her 
work began, and at night after the day's work 
was done. We three children had a pallet 
on the dirt floor. I cannot remember having 
slept in a bed until after our family was de- 
clared free by the Emancipation Proclamation. 

I have been asked to tell something about 



178 A SLAVE AMONG SLAVES 

the sports I engaged in during my youth. 
Until that question was asked it had never 
occurred to me that there was never any time 
in my Hfe for play; almost every day was 
occupied with some kind of labor. During 
my period of slavery I was not large enough 
to be of much service, still I was kept busy 
most of the time in cleaning the yards, carry- 
ing water to the men in the fields, or going to 
the mill with corn once a week to be ground. 
This trip I always dreaded. 

The heavy bag of corn would be thrown 
across the back of the horse, and the corn 
divided about evenly on each side. But in 
some way, almost without exception on these 
trips, the corn would so shift as to become 
unbalanced and would fall off the horse, and 
I would fall with it. As I was not strong 
enough to reload the corn upon the horse I 
would have to wait sometimes for hours, 
until a passer-by came along who would help 
me out of my trouble. I would be late in 
reaching the mill, and by the time I got my 
corn ground and reached home it would be far 
into the night. The road was a lonely one 



A SLAVE AMONG SLAVES 179 

and led through dense forests. I was always 
frightened. Besides, when I was late in 
getting home I knew I would always get a 
severe scolding or a flogging. 

I had no schooling whatever while I was 
a slave, though I remember going on several 
occasions as far as the school-house door with 
one of my young mistresses to carry her books. 
The picture of several dozen boys and girls in 
a schoolroom engaged in study made a deep 
impression on me, and I had the feeling that 
to get into a school-house and study in this 
way would be about the same as getting into 
paradise. 

One may get the idea from what I have said 
that there was bitter feeling toward the white 
people on the part of my race because of the 
fact that most of the white population fought 
in a war which would result in keeping the 
negro in slavery if the South was successful. 
In the case of the slaves on our place this was 
not true, and it was not true of any large 
portion of the slaves in the South that were 
treated with any kind of decency. During 
the Civil War one of my young masters was 



180 A SLAVE AMONG SLAVES 

killed and two were brought home severely 
wounded. The sorrow in the slave quarter 
was only second to that in the *^big house.'* 
Some of the slaves begged to sit up at night 
and nurse their wounded masters. The slave 
who was selected to sleep in the '^big house" 
during the absence of the men was considered 
to have a place of honor. In order to defend 
and protect the women and children who were 
left on the plantation, the slaves would have 
laid down their lives. 

But the slaves wanted freedom. I have 
never seen one who did not want to be free, or 
one who would return to slavery. I pity from 
the bottom of my heart any nation or body 
of people that is so unfortunate as to get 
entangled in the net of slavery. 

No one section of our country was wholly 
responsible for its introduction and, besides, 
it was recognized and protected for years by 
the General Government.. Then, when we 
rid ourselves of prejudice and race feeling, and 
look facts in the face, we see that the ten 
million negroes of this country who them- 
selves or whose ancestors went through slav- 



A SLAVE AMONG SLAVES 181 

ery, in spite of it, are in a better and more 
hopeful condition than the black people in 
any other part of the globe. 

Ever since I have been old enough to think 
for myself, I have thought, in spite of the 
cruel wrongs inflicted upon us, the black man 
got nearly as much out of slavery as the white 
man did. The slave system, on our place, 
took the self reliance and self help out of the 
white people. My old master had many boys 
and girls but not one, so far as I know, ever 
learned a single trade. The girls were not 
taught to cook, sew or to take care of the 
house. All this was left to the slaves. The 
slaves, of course, had little interest in the life 
of the plantation, and they were too ignorant 
to do things in the most improved and 
thorough way. So the fences were out of 
repair and the gates hung half off their hinges, 
doors creaked, window panes were out, plaster- 
ing fell and weeds grew in the yard. There 
was a waste of food and other materials, too, 
that was sad. 

Finally the war closed, and the day of 
freedom approached. It would be a moment- 



182 A SLAVE AMONG SLAVES 

ous day to all upon our plantation. We had 
been expecting it. Freedom was in the air, 
and had been for months. As the great day 
grew nearer, there was more singing in the 
slave quarters than usual. It was bolder, 
had more ring in it, and lasted far into the 
night. Most of the verses of the plantation 
songs had some reference to freedom. True, 
they had sung these same verses before, but 
they had felt that the freedom in these songs 
referred to the next world and not to the 
freedom of the body here. The night before 
the eventful day, word was sent to the slave 
quarters to the effect that something unusual 
was going to take place in the '^big house" 
the next morning. There was little, if any, 
sleep that night. All was excitement and 
expectancy. 

Early the next morning word was sent to all 
the slaves, young and old, to gather at the 
house. In company with my mother, brother, 
and sister, and a large company of other slaves 
I went to our master^s house. All of our 
master's family were either standing or seated 
on the veranda of the house, where they 



A SLAVE AMONG SLAVES 183 

could see what was to take place and hear 
what was said. There was a feeling of deep 
interest, or perhaps sadness, on their faces 
but not bitterness. They did not seem to be 
sad because of the loss of property, but rather 
at parting with those who they had reared 
and who were in many ways very close to 
them. 

The most distinct thing that I now recall 
in connection with the scene was the presence 
of a United States officer who made a short 
speech and then read a rather long paper — 
the Emancipation Proclamation, I think. 
After the reading we were told that we were 
free, and could go when and where we pleased. 
My mother, who was standing by my side, 
leaned over and kissed her children while 
tears of joy ran down her cheeks. She ex- 
plained to us what it all meant, that this was 
the day for which she had been so long pray- 
ing, but fearing that she would never live to 
see. 

For some moments there was great rejoicing 
and thanksgiving, but there was no feeling of 
bitterness. The wild joy of the emancipated 



184 A SLAVE AMONG SLAVES 

colored people lasted for only a brief period 
and I noticed that by the time they returned 
to their cabins there was a change of feeling. 
The great responsibility of being free; of hav- 
ing charge of themselves, of having to think 
and plan for themselves and their children 
took possession of them. It v^as very much 
like turning a boy of ten or twelve years out 
into the world to provide for himself. In a 
few hours the great question with which the 
Anglo-Saxon race had been grappling for 
centuries had been thrown upon these people 
to solve — how to get a home, a living, how to 
rear their children, how to provide schools, 
establish citizenship and support churches. 

To some it seemed that, now they were in 
actual possession of it, freedom was a more 
serious thing than they had expected to find 
it. 

Some of the slaves were seventy or eighty 
years old; their best days were gone. They 
had no strength with which to earn a living 
in a strange place and among a strange people, 
even if they had been sure where to find a 
new place of abode. Besides, deep down in 



A SLAVE AMONG SLAVES 185 

their hearts there was a strange and peculiar 
attachment to **old Missus/' and to their 
children v^hich they found it hard to think 
of breaking off. With these they had spent in 
some cases nearly half a century, and it was no 
light thing to think of parting. 

Gradually, one by one, stealthily at first, 
the older slaves began to wander from the 
slave quarters back to the "big house' ' to 
have a whispered conversation with their 
former owners about the future. 



ONE FLAG OR TWO? 

Andy sat beside his drum under an apple 
tree in a Gettysburg orchard. 

The drum was almost as large as he and his 
head nodded over it. It was still dark and 
he was very tired. But the far away whistling 
of bullets that came to him once in awhile 
kept him awake. He was wondering too what 
was happening back home in Kentucky and 
remembering a day there two years before. 
He had thrown down his school books and 
enlisted on the day when he was thirteen years 
old. Andy was a drummer boy in our Civil 
War in which brothers were fighting brothers, 
and there were two flags, one for the North 
and one for the South. 

Kentucky in 1861 when Andy had enlisted 
could remember its old ways of wilderness 
and blood. There were still log cabins along 
its turnpikes and Andy had seen two, not so 
very far apart, that made the state notable. 



ONE FLAG OR TWO? 187 

In one of these cabins Abraham Lincoln had 
been born and in the other Jefferson Davis. 
That was another strange thing about this 
war, there were two presidents, Abraham 
Lincoln at Washington and Jefferson Davis 
at Richmond. There were also two groups, 
now, of states, a northern and a southern 
group. 

That had been a wonderful morning when 
Andy had first strapped his drum over his 
shoulder and marched along beside his com- 
pany in a new blue uniform. The younger 
boys who ran through the street beside the 
troops wore red, white and blue neckties, 
and the girls followed too, helping to carry the 
Stars and Stripes. There was cheering and 
hand shaking and the band played ^When 
Johnny Comes Marching Home'^ as the troop 
train rolled out of the station with Andy on 
board. A good many other boys had joined 
the armies, also, from southern plantations 
and from the manufacturing towns of the 
north. They were beating drums and play- 
ing bugles and bearing flags and carrying 
water and hardtack to the soldiers under fire. 



188 ONE FLAG OR TWO? 

and making their way through the Union 
and the Confederate lines with messages of 
information and warning. They were doing 
something else too. The first pink light of 
the sunrise came down through the leaves 
of the apple tree and touched Andy's face 
with a brave morning courage as he re- 
membered an order that his conmianding 
officer had given him: 

'^Drummer boys, during a battle, are to 
take off their drums and help carry the 
wounded from the field on stretchers. This 
is their duty in a time of engagement and is 
just as important as taking a hand at a gun." 

Andy struggled to his feet, trying to brush 
the dust of yesterday's march from his blue 
shirt. His shoes were ragged and his cap 
was torn where a bullet had ripped through 
the blue cloth. Two years of soldiering had 
almost made a man of him; his long trousers 
were above his shoe tops now. But the day 
and night tramping in every kind of weather, 
and living in a leaky tent among bayonet 
scabbards and tinware, greasy pork and dirty 
biscuits had taken the fun out of the adven- 



ONE FLAG OR TWO? 189 

ture. Andy asked himself what this Civil 
War was all about. So far, for him, it had 
been a backache from his heavy knapsack, 
and the sound of the crying of wounded men, 
and a long red trail of blood wherever the two 
armies met. But a loud ^Torward*' rang 
through the orchard and the boy slipped his 
drum strap over his shoulder. There was no 
time to wonder. He must go on with his 
battalion. 

/ It was now July of the year 1863. Regiment 
I slier regiment in their worn, ragged blue 
/ poured over the hills and toward the httle 
Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg. Andy kept 
up with his men, beating out *The Girl I 
Left Behind Me," until he and the other 
drummer boys saw little white puffs of smoke 
down in the valley just ahead. Then came 
the faint boom and the nearer thunder from 
the cannon. Still the drumming kept up 
bravely and the army of the North advanced 
in double quick time toward the smoke and 
the mouths of the cannon. Dp another Hill 
and across a stream on a pontoon bridge, 
tearing down fences and trampling gardens 



190 ONE FLAG OR TWO? 

it went, as Andy followed with the rest. Then, 
in a bright strip of meadow land, the regi- 
ments halted an^ he heard the quick, sharp 
order: ^ ^tt^fX^ 

^^Unfurl the flag! Load! Fire!^' 
In an instant the meadow was a battle- 
ground. The explosion of shells and the sing- 
ing of bullets mingled with shouts of the 
soldiers and the groans of the dying. The 
sunshine was obscured by the smoke from the 
guns. Andy sat down on his drum on the 
edge of the field and when the smoke lifted 
a little he could see the men running, sighting, 
ramming their guns, firing, swabbing out the 
cannon and then sending more shells shrieking 
over the field in the direction of those that 
were bursting toward them. Quite often a 
shell whizzed past the drummer boy, or dug 
up the earth beside him, but he waited there 
all day behind the line without moving until 
he saw, as the smoke lifted again, that the 
ranks were thinning fast and there was need 
of him. So Andy got up from his drum, 
motioned .to another boy to follow him and 



ONE FLAG OR TWO? 191 

they went out into the midst of the fighting 
with a stretcher. 

Andy led the way, dodging the shell fire 
as best he could, keeping close to a rail fence, 
but going straight toward an advancing line 
of gray that was pouring a rain of lead followed 
by a deadly artillery fire into the regiments 
of blue. All ovQr the field there lay men dead 
and "dying. /The two boys crouched and 
crept through this tempest of battle until they 
were able to lift a wounded soldier onto their 
stretcher, stagger away with him, and grope 
along in the smoke to the back of the line 
where they could lay him down in safety on 
the grass. They looked at him, plainly out- 
lined in the summer sunshine. A thin stream 
of blood trickhng from his chest stained his 
uniform. They saw that his coat was not blue. 
It was gray. 

Andy spoke first, to the other boy. 

''Get him some water from my flask," he 
said 'Svhile I bandage his arm." To himself 
he exclaimed. 'Tve brought in a Con- 
federate!" 

After the soldier had drunk from Andy's 



192 ONE FLAG OR TWO? 

tin cup and had rested a minute he looked up, 
amazed, in the drummer boy's face, and Andy 
looked down at him. Why, there was only 
the difference of a few years in their ages. 
^, ''Anything I can do for you?'' Andy asked. 
' ''I'd like to go home," the Confederate 
boy smiled a little as he spoke, "home to 
Dixie." 

"What's it like?" Andy asked. 

"The best place in the world," the boy in 
gray said, half talking to himself. "I'd like 
to have you see it — a big white house with 
pine woods all round it and pretty nearly a 
mile of cotton fields, and roses and fruit grow- 
ing in the garden. We've everything we want 
right there in the house that has so many 
rooms you could hardly count them. You 
ought to see the drawing room with aU our old 
family pictures, and the music room where 
we have concerts and charades, and the store- 
room full of things that we buy for the planta- 
tion, tools and new saddles and bridles, 
calico dresses and overalls and shoes for the 
negroes and nails and screws and pocket 
knives, whatever we need. I'd like to be 



ONE FLAG OR TWO? 193 

there tonight/' the boy in gray stopped for 
breath and then went on. 

'^The cotton fields are as white as snow and 
you never saw stars Kke those that shine over 
the South. The Hghts twinkle out from the 
cabin windows and the banjoes are playing — 
at least they were — " the soldier raised him- 
self a little as he spoke bitterly, ''until the 
North interfered with our way of living. 
We raise the cotton that the North makes 
into cloth, and we need our slaves to work in 
the cotton fields. We have to buy our tools 
and our food, and the North spends the 
money we pay it in building the factories and 
railroads and docks that we ought to have. 
! That's why this war is being fought, to show 
that the South has rights in the Government 
and the right to secede from the Union too 
and live the way it began, on a plantation.'' 

It had been a long speech for the wounded 
Southern boy. He lay down on the grass and 
then pointed to something back of Andy. The 
drummer boy turned and saw a soldier in a 
blue uniform dragging himself along over the 
ground, wounded too, like his brother in gray. 



194 ONE FLAG OR TWO? 

Andy tried to help him and the Northern 
soldier dropped down at last not so far from 
the other. In a minute, though, he tried to 
go on again. 

^'Hold on. You can't walk, you know," 
Andy warned him. ^'YouVe got a bullet in 
your back. Where were you trying to go?'' 

'^Home, I guess," the soldier in blue gasped, 
dropping down on the ground but trying, too, 
to smile. '^Home where I could get a clean 
white shirt," he went on, ^^for I won't be any 
more use at fighting. We make shirts in our 
town up north from the loom to the sewing 
machine. I'd like to get a copy of The 
Tribune or that book of Mr. Longfellow's, 
Hiawatha, that everybody's reading, from 
our town library. I'd like to go to the town 
meeting and tell them how I helped the North 
to try and keep the Union together, and I'd 
go to our white meeting house on Sunday. 
I wish I could have a piece of my mother's 
apple pie — I should like to see my mother — " 
he was too weak to say anything more. 

Andy kneeled down on the grass beside the 
quivering boy in blue and held the same tin 



ONE FLAG OR TWO? 195 

cup of water to his lips from which the other 
soldier had drunk. He could understand now 
why there was a Civil War. The North and 
the South, like two children who had grown 
up, had, each, built its own home and raised 
its own, new family. They were different, 
because the soil on which they had been born 
and lived was different. The South was a 
place of springing green cotton shoots and 
roses and ease and sovereignty. The North 
was a place of rocks and clattering machinery 
and industry and intolerance. There was 
mutual misunderstanding, dislike, and con- 
tempt between the two. Each of these new 
families wish to exclude the other from control 
in the federal government. It was a war to 
decide if one of these branches of the Union, 
the South, had a right to withdraw its family 
of states from the home roof that the Stars 
and Stripes had spread over it. 

Taps! Andy heard the sound of the bugle 
coming back faintly from the battleground, 
for the day was over and with sunset had 
come a respite in the bloodshed. He looked at 
his two soldiers resting side by side there on 



196 ONE FLAG OR TWO? 

the grass behind the lines. They were half 
asleep now, so he went over to a spring, filled 
his water flask and set it with the tin cup 
between them. Then he shouldered his 
knapsack and his drum and went through the 
gathering dusk over to the field of Gettysburg. 

It was no longer a green field, but a field 
of gray and blue; gray, the color of the sky 
just before the dawning of a beautiful sunrise, 
and blue, the sky color that holds the most 
sunshine. Forty three thousand American 
men killed, wounded or missing! The field 
of Gettysburg was red with the blood of the 
North and the South. Andy couldn't bear 
to look at it, at first. Then he remembered 
something that his grandfather had said to 
comfort him when he had been quite a little 
fellow and afraid that an adventure in the 
woods he had been looking forward to was 
going to be spoiled by a storm: 

' 'Evening red and morning gray — 

A sure sign of a pleasant day." Andy's 
grandfather had said. 

That was the promise of the battlefield of 
Gettysburg before him in which so much blue 



ONE FLAG OR TWO? 197 

intermingled with the gray, as if for hope, and 
the Stars and Stripes still waved above it. 
It was the Fourth of July, 1863, when the 
long, hard road of our Civil War began to 
turn toward the common home and the com- 
mon brotherhood of the Union. 



UNCLE REMUS AT THE WHITE HOUSE 

"And what happened then?'^ the small boy 
curled up in old Aunt Betsy^s chimney corner 
asked, his eyes wide with wonder. 

"Brer Rabbit en Brer Tarrypin, dey went 
home wid de gals/' Aunt Betsy finished as 
she took down her jar of ginger cookies from 
a shelf in the corner of the little Georgia 
cabin and offered Joel a handful. Joel 
munched the cookies happily as he looked out 
of Aunt Betsy's door and across the fields of 
snow white cotton. He felt as if he were the 
most contented boy in all Putnam County, 
even if it was hard grubbing sometimes in the 
tiny home where he and his mother lived. 

Aunt Betsy was ready to welcome him 
down there at her cabin in the pine grove 
and tell him stories and make him sweet 
potato biscuits any day. She welcomed the 
other village boys as well and when she was 
busy at work out in the fields there was Uncle 



UNCLE REMUS AT THE WHITE HOUSE 199 

Ben, the old negro mail rider, to entertain 
the boys. Uncle Ben rode from their town 
of Eatonton to Monticello, but he sometimes 
had time to stop outside of the Eatonton 
post office to tell Joel a new adventure of Brer 
Bear or Brer Wolf. 

JoeFs imagination was full of the stories he 
so loved as he started home through the grove. 
The rustling of the grass was like the foot- 
steps of little Brer Rabbit and OV Molly Hare, 
his wife, going home to their cabin on the other 
side of the brier patch. The yellow flowering 
jasmine reminded him of the party dresses of 
Miss Meadows and the girls. A flash of rusty 
red on the edge of the hickory woods was Brer 
Fox loping along, all ready to play tricks on 
some one. 

Hospitality, plenty, and friendship with 
all, even with these humble beasts of the wild, 
were the qualities that characterized the 
South when Joel Chandler Harris was a boy 
of twelve in the Georgia of 1861. 

He had reached the village now. How he 
did love every familiar bit of its green and 
white hominess. Eatonton, and all the rest 



200 UNCLE REMUS AT THE WHITE HOUSE 

of the cotton belt for that matter, had not 
changed much since its first cotton field had 
been planted and its first colonial house built, 
surrounded by the cabins of the slaves and 
forming a plantation in the seventies. The 
plantation was a peculiar and necessary kind 
of settlement in the South. It sheltered the 
owners, the workers, the business of house- 
keeping, farming, and raising and shipping 
the cotton which filled the huge flat barges 
that took their slow way down the muddy, 
yellow streams of the Southern states. So 
the Southern town and Southern manner of 
living had grown, from the very necessities 
of the climate and products, to be quite dif- 
ferent from those of the North. 

Joel had never been North and he did not 
see any real need of going. Eatonton, he 
thought, as he walked slowly down its tree 
lined streets was pleasant enough for any boy. 
It was a peaceful little place with a white 
court house, a green square in the centre, and 
beautiful old colonial houses. They had 
stood for decades behind their tall green 
hedges among sweetly odorous cedars and 



UNCLE REMUS AT THE WHITE HOUSE 201 

oleanders, their doors wide open to their 
neighbors and to this Httle red haired boy 
and his hard working and loving mother. 

He reached their white front gate at last, 
stopped and Ustened. Yes, he recognized 
that sound; a blue jay was cracking the 
acorns it had hidden in the knot holes of the 
wood shed. He heard the pattering foot- 
steps of a squirrel as it ran along the shingles 
of their shabby little frame house. One 
learned those outdoor ways in the South. 
After Joel had finished hoeing the potato 
patch he was going to peep at the partridge's 
nest in the meadow beyond the garden. 
There was going to be a chicken pie for supper; 
he could smell it baking in the brick oven. 
What a happy day it had been, and Joel 
looked forward to so many more! 

Suddenly, though, like a storm that blights 
the cotton crop, the plantations of the South 
were shocked from their century old peace. 

Joel Harris, a boy in his teens, felt the 
storm at the very beginning. He heard tales 
of run-away slaves and their depredations, 
although he was told that planters who 



202 UNCLE REMUS AT THE WHITE HOUSE 

treated their negroes justly had nothing to 
fear from them. He saw boys from Putnam 
County, only slightly older than he, march 
away from the town green in the gray uniform 
of the Confederacy for the battle fields of 
Virginia. Very few of these young soldiers 
ever came home again. Joel wanted to do 
something to help his homeland of the South, 
but he was only a lad and growing poorer 
every day as the pinch of the war came to be 
felt in Putnam County. Cotton fields were 
running to weeds. The old houses were in 
need of repair. Food was scarce. The ladies 
of the plantations were burying their silver 
in their gardens, and the men were hiding 
the horses and mules in the swamps. 

Then, in the fall of 1864, two officers in the 
blue uniform of the Federal army clattered 
out of Atlanta and rode up through middle 
Georgia with the ominous word that a com- 
pany of troops under the leadership of General 
Sherman would follow on the way to the sea. 
Joel Harris, terrified, but eager to know what 
the news meant, tramped over neglected 
fields until he found a place near Milledgeville 



UNCLE REMUS AT THE WHITE HOUSE 203 

on Sherman^s direct line of march. He 
climbed a fence there at the edge of the road, 
and waited. 

All at once, Sherman's army appeared. 
A long blue column that choked the road and 
crowded the ditches at the side swung along 
in the wake of the couriers. It was a vast 
horde, bringing consternation to the planta- 
tions. The Twentieth Army Corps under 
the command of General Slocum came down 
the high road past Joel, grim fighters, over- 
coming all resistance. They displayed no 
flying banners or any of the gay trappings 
of war such as Joel had read of. They were 
just a body of tramping soldiers, tired horses 
and lumbering wagons that ploughed their 
way through the deep mud of the clay roads. 
They brought with them a confused array of 
captured mules, cows, food supplies and am- 
munition. Their rear was crowded with 
fleeing negroes. Some of the soldiers laughed 
at the boy on the fence as they passed. 

When the last mule and the last slave had 
passed, Joel got down and went home. He 
felt dazed at first, for everything was so 



204 UNCLE REMUS AT THE WHITE HOUSE 

strangely deserted. The stock was gone, the 
cabins were empty and the hearths were cold. 
The town itself was still, as if it had died in 
its sleep. Had this life struggle between the 
brothers in gray and the brothers in blue 
killed the South, Joel wondered? 

Suddenly he heard a soft breath like low 
laughter in the pine grove, and the odor of 
jasmine came to him like a dream. Miss 
Meadows and the girls, who made up the 
beautiful nature family of outdoors, had not 
followed Sherman to the sea. They waited 
in every old garden and forest haunt to com- 
fort Joel. He heard an odd little chuckle 
beneath his feet. That was Brer Rabbit who 
had just made his escape from a brier patch 
again to show Joel that the humble often get 
the best of a bad situation, and it is always 
a good plan to look on the funny side of ones 
troubles. Beside Joel, in the road torn by the 
Federal troops, Brer Terrapin crawled slowly. 
He raised his head and twisted it knowingly 
at the boy. 

'^There is still wisdom left,^' Brer Terrapin 



UNCLE REMUS AT THE WHITE HOUSE 205 

seemed to say, "and a long life in which to 
practise it." 

Joel rubbed his eyes to see if he was dream- 
ing. Why, the old plantations were still alive, 
just as they had been in his former days. 
What if he was penniless, and with no pros- 
pects for his young manhood? There was a 
friend waiting for him in one of those empty 
cabins, Uncle Remus. Joel went in and sat 
down beside Uncle Remus, himself the little 
boy he used to be. Through the years of 
reconstruction that followed Joel Chandler 
Harris mustered a jolly company of animals 
and birds and outdoor folk who went out 
into the world in the Uncle Remus stories, 
from the South to the North and at last 
reached the White House. 

One day in the year 1907 when the Civil 
War was only a memory and Mr. Harris an 
elderly man, there came a letter to him at 
Snap-Bean Farm, his beautiful estate in 
Georgia, from the President of the United 
States. Mr. Harris had been telling stories of 
the South to the children of the Union for 
many years. Children and their parents, too, 



206 UNCLE REMUS AT THE WHITE HOUSE 

had read and loved his stories in the Century 
Magazine, in the Saturday Evening Post, that 
Mr. Benjamin Franklin had founded, in our 
Youth's Companion and in many other publi- 
cations. His books of stories with the funny 
pictures that you know, were in many homes. 
They were in the White House as well, for the 
mother of the family of children there read 
out loud to them almost every night about 
Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox and the rest. 

The letter to Mr. Harris said among other 
things, 

''Won^t you come up and have dinner with 
us? 

Theodore Roosevelt.'' 

Mr. Harris could hardly make up his mind 
to go. He had never traveled much and he 
dreaded leaving his boys and girls, his horses 
and dogs and his farm. Most of all he dreaded 
such an important visit. But at last he was 
persuaded to accept the President's invitation 
and he made the trip from Atlanta to Wash- 
ington. There was a little Roosevelt boy 
waiting to greet him on the steps of the White 
House; he had been allowed to stay up 



UNCLE REMUS AT THE WHITE HOUSE 207 

beyond his bedtime just for this and Joel 
Chandler Harris felt no longer like a stranger. 

There was an ovation for him the next day. 
He stood with the President on the balcony 
of the White House and looked down into the 
eyes of a great, affectionate populace. There 
was also a state luncheon for him at the 
White House at which Thedore Roosevelt 
said: 

'Tresidents may come and presidents may 
go, but Uncle Remus stays put. Georgia has 
done a great many things for the Union, but 
hais never done more than when she gave Joel 
Chandler Harris to American literature.'^ 

It was a wonderful visit, and Mr. Harris 
wrote home about the White House: 

*^It gave me a feeling as if I had been there 
before/' he said. ^^It's a kind of feeling that 
you can have in your own house if youVe 
lived right; but if anybody had told me that 
I'd find it in full flower in the White House, a 
house that ten million politicians and a good 
part of the public have tramped through, I 
never would have believed them. 

"It's a home; it'll come over you like a 



208 UNCLE REMUS AT THE WHITE HOUSE 

sweet dream the minute you get in the door, 
and you'll wonder how they sweep out all 
the politics and keep the place sweet and 
wholesome." 

All sorts and kinds of forces work together 
to build a great nation. If you should go to 
Atlanta, Georgia, some day you might have 
an opportunity to read these words engraved 
on a granite rock there and describing Joel 
Chandler Harris: 

'^I seem to see before me the smiling faces 
of thousands of children — ^some young and 
fresh and some bearing the friendly marks 
of age, but all children at heart — and not an 
unfriendly face among them. And while I 
am trying hard to speak the right word, I seem 
to hear a voice lifted above the rest, saying 
'You have made some of us happy.' And so I 
feel my heart fluttering and my lips trembling 
and I have to bow silently, and hurry away 
into the obscurity that fits me best." 

So we know that the stories of Uncle 
Remus had and still have a place in the mak- 
ing of our history. They bring the children 
of the South, the North, the East and the 



UNCLE REMU9 AT THE WHITE HOUSE 209 

West together in happiness without a single 
unfriendly face. They make us believe in 
beauty, in the wisdom of the humble, in the 
good in everything and in the realness of 
things that we cannot touch or see. 



UNCLE SAM^S BIRTHDAY PARTY 

The year, 1876, when Uncle Sam was one 
hundred years old, seemed a very suitable 
time for him to give a birthday party. It was 
just a century since the declaration of indepen- 
dence had been signed, a most eventful 
century, too, for it had seen the beginning 
of the United States, the great national 
struggle of the Civil War and the gradual 
rebuilding of the Union as time and industry 
and good feeling brought the people together 
again. 

There was another reason, also, for giving 
this anniversary party. Uncle Sam had a 
beautiful young daughter whom he desired 
to introduce to the society of the nations. 
Her cheeks were the color of the roses of the 
South and her hair was as golden as the wavmg 
fields of grain in the West. She had the 
sturdy independence of her Pilgrim ancestors 
and the grace of the cavaliers of Virginia. 



UNCLE SAM'S BIRTHDAY PARTY 211 

Her coronet was encircled with the stars of 
the Union, her dress was our flag and she 
always carried the torch of liberty, for her 
name was Columbia. Uncle Sam was justly 
proud of his daughter and he believed that 
the Old World would be as well if only it 
might see ^ and become acquainted with 
Columbia. ^^'" 

That was why he gave our Centennial 
exhibition at Philadelphia, the first capital 
of the federal repubhc, in the year 1876. 

It was possible for the Congress to spend 
quite a sum of money in preparing for this 
coming-out party of Columbia's and four 
million dollars was appropriated. Stately 
buildings were erected on Philadelphia's green 
land in Fairmount Park for welcoming the 
guests and for holding the birthday gifts 
which Uncle Sam surmised would be offered 
on this ervrentful occasion. These buildings 
with the roads and pleasure grounds and 
flower gardens that surrounded them covered 
almost a hundred acres, and the entire space 
was so gay with our Stars and Stripes and the 
flags of other nations which were used in the 



212 UNCLE SAM'S BIRTHDAY PARTY 

decorative plan that the whole was a place of 
color such as history had almost never seen. 

Varied kinds of preparation were begun for 
this Centennial party as soon as Uncle Sam 
issued his invitations. Queen Victoria of 
England made some etchings to send as her 
offering to Columbia, and our beloved poet, 
John Greenleaf Whittier, wrote his Centennial 
hymn. Mr. Sydney Lanier of Georgia com- 
posed a cantata for the school children of 
Philadelphia to sing. China began packing 
chests of fragrant tea, and the old German 
workmen of the Black Forest made cuckoo 
clocks to send to America. The drivers of the 
rattling little horse cars that went through 
the streets of Philadelphia had new blue 
uniforms and put red, white and blue rosettes 
on the harness of their horses. Old Mr. Wise 
and his niece and his little grandson, John, 
brought their balloons to the Centennial 
Exhibition. Ballooning was a new and danger- 
ous as well as a thrilling sport, and the Wise 
family was in great demand at circuses and 
other outdoor entertainments. A new rail- 
road route from New York to Philadelphia 



UNCLE SAM'S BIRTHDAY PARTY 213 

and one from Buffalo were completed. Ameri- 
cans had not travelled very much or very far 
up to this time, but here was a great op- 
portunity for them to meet. 

As the gates of the Centennial exhibition 
opened, Uncle Sam, mingling with the va'st 
crowd that thronged the grounds, knew that 
his party was a success. 

It was a crowd that looked like the colored 
pictures in that pile of Godey's Ladies' Books 
that you like to look over up in your great 
grandmother's attic. The ladies wore very 
full skirts, their polonaises caught up with 
little bunches of flowers, and a great deal of 
fringe hung down from their close fitting 
basques and bright shawls. The little girls 
had on striped stockings and high kid boots 
with tassels, and the boy's' neckties were much 
larger and of brighter colors than any boy of 
today would select. They were tied in bows, 
and large bows too, underneath their round 
collars. The men had tortoise shell watch 
chains made with large links, and they wore 
very tall beaver hats. Here and there in the 
mass of people a Manchu 'cloak, a Cossack 



214 UNCLE SAM'S BIRTHDAY PARTY 

uniform, a suit of English tweed, or the 
bright bonnet of a French woman was to be 
seen, for almost all Europe had come to our 
Centennial. 

The most amazing part of it, though, was 
Columbia's gifts. The original buildings 
were not adequate for holding them all and 
some of the foreign nations had to erect their 
own for the carvings of India, France's 
jewelry, embroideries from Egypt, the new 
Swiss watches, Africa's ivories and skins, 
Hawaiian shells and corals, Bohemian glass- 
ware, Italian mosaic and the hundreds of other 
exhibits brought from the Old World. 

Wonderful as these examples of hand 
skill were, however, they were equalled and 
excelled by the gifts to civilization that our 
own United States showed. 

We exhibited the use of exploding gun- 
powder in excavating, driving piles and min- 
ing, a monster engine of fourteen hundred 
horse power that could move all the machinery 
in the Centennial Exposition; pneumatic 
tubes for transporting small parcels which 
were going to be used later for carrying cash 



UNCLE SAM'S BIRTHDAY PARTY 215 

receivers in our department stores; even such 
novelties and wonders as typewriters and 
airbrakes for railroad trains were demon- 
strated. Those everyday objects, of which 
we scarcely think but always need, were new 
then and were looked upon with wonder 
and something of awe by the Centennial 
visitors. The people were able to see the 
manufacture of bricks, boots and shoes, 
newspapers, pins, nails, candy, tacks, shingles, 
corks, dress goods and envelopes. The patent 
office showed five tho^usand models of useful 
things that Americans had invented. 

Looking quietly into one room of the 
Educational building Uncle Sam saw his first 
kindergarten. In another room, boys and 
girls were learning to use tools in carpentry 
and other manual training. Still another 
room showed how beautiful and homelike a 
school can be made through the use of good 
pictures and growing plants. All these sug- 
gestions to teachers were going to help in 
making the American school system, later, 
the best in the world. 

One of the most interesting exhibits was 



216 UNCLE SAM'S BIRTHDAY PARTY 

that which showed our contribution to the 
world^s pantry. The Western States sent 
fruits and food grains of all kinds. The South- 
ern states showed the use of the incubator in 
raising chickens. New England offered farm- 
ing implements and machinery from its busy 
factories that were vastly better than any in 
use in Europe. Several model bake shops were 
going, turning out hot loaves and rolls by the 
minute. The visitors from Europe discovered 
the value of our Indian corn, and even Asia 
began buying it of Uncle Sam after the 
Exposition. They wanted our dried fruits, 
as well, and dressed beef that we were able 
soon to ship by the refrigerating method in 
steamships. Uncle Sam changed from an 
importer to an exporter after the Centennial. 
He had more to sell than he had need of buy- 
ing. 

No one wanted this great birthday party 
of a new nation to come to an end. The only 
reason for its stopping was that every one 
needed and wanted to get back to work. The 
farmer from Illinois had seen a Massachusetts 
plough that he was anxious to try out. A 



UNCLE SAM'S BIRTHDAY PARTY 217 

Connecticut miller had decided to move out 
West, nearer the wheat fields. A Southern 
lady had decided to spend a winter North and 
offer the warmth of her Carolina hospitality 
and the sweetness of her cakes to her New 
York friends. And several Northern men had 
made up their minds that they would like to 
try raising cotton and oranges in the South. 

The last day of the Centennial Exhibition 
found Uncle Sam sitting in the office building 
in the grounds going over his accounts. He 
was counting admission tickets and could 
scarcely believe the results. It was probable, 
of course, that a great number of the nation's 
own people and its foreign guests had come 
through the gates several times, but there 
were about nine million admissions. How 
we were growing! 

Then Uncle Sam checked up the foreign 
countries who had travelled with their offer- 
ings to this coming out party for Columbia, 
and the result was quite as surprising. Thirty- 
three nations had come! And the States, 
Columbia's own family of brothers and sisters 
who had forgotten former quarrels and 



218 UNCLE SAM'S BIRTHDAY PARTY 

journeyed in seven league boots to do her 
honor. There had been only thirteen states 
for a long time, but twenty-six were repre- 
sented at the Centennial. 

Outside, our new fireworks were being sent 
up over the grounds. Colored fire and huge 
rockets that made a design as they shot up 
into midair had been perfected, and one could 
see a tree of liberty and a great star, made up 
of smaller stars to represent the Union, 
illuminated over the old City of Independence. 
There was hardly, ever, so pleasant or so 
significant a birthday party as this one had 
been. It had not only introduced us to the 
other nations as a self supporting, progres- 
sive, growing people. It had, amazingly, 
shown ourselves that we were common citizens 
of a common country, brought closely to- 
gether in one united family by our common 
impulse to work and to achieve. 



THE SHIP THE GIANTS LAUNCHED 

A giant in American history! There has 
been none in any history since the days of 
GoHath, you say. Magic and the black arts! 
These, too, you say are never to be found 
between the covers of a nation^s history; 
their only place is on the illuminated pages 
that tell of the Arabian Nights. Yet two 
giants grew in our United States during the 
years that followed the Civil War. They 
are here with us today, and the wonders they 
have done and are yet to work make a story 
stranger than any that was ever written in 
fairy lore. 

One of these giants built an American city. 
The tall chimneys of the city^s factories were 
his castle towers, and to the factories he 
brought riches which our earth from East and 
West, and from the North to the South hid 
in her bosom for whoever was able to extract 
them. There was iron which made the steel 



220 THE SHIP THE GIANTS LAUNCHED 

framework of the city and coal for firing the 
great blasting furnaces that turned the iron, 
like black magic, into steel. The giant 
brought timber , copper, the precious metals, 
rubber, stone, flour, meats, vegetables and 
fruit to the city to make it a place of con- 
venience and comfort in which to live. He 
surrounded the factories with homes and sky- 
high office buildings and stores. His auto- 
mobiles rolled over stone highways. Electric 
cars and steel bridges and steam railroad 
systems linked the city with other American 
manufacturing centres and with the fair, open 
country. 

It was an amazing piece of construction 
and in accomplishing it the giant grew more 
and more colossal. His panting breath rose 
in smoke out of the factory chimneys, and the 
red hot metal that poured from the furnaces of 
the iron factories was like his life blood. He 
had such an impulse to grow and add to his 
possessions that his garments became dingy 
with the fog and dirt of the city, and he could 
hot spare time to cleanse them and his mighty 
voice could be heard in the factory siren, the 



THE SHIP THE GIANTS LAUNCHED 221 

roar of traffic and in the shriek of steamboats 
and train whistles. 

This was our American giant, wealth. 

Then the second giant came to the American 
city. Like the other, Wealth, he was a creature 
of the earth and came from the mountains, 
the forests and the farm lands. His skin was 
the color of all the races of the earth, white, 
black, yellow, and brown; and his clothing 
was that of the American, the Irish, the 
Italian, the Pole, the Armenian, the 
Hungarian, the Scotch, the Japanese, the 
Chinese and all other men. This giant 
came to the American city from the uttermost 
boundaries of the United States and from 
the four quarters of the globe as well. He 
was so hardy that he could stand in front of an 
open furnace door and ladle out melted iron 
without flinching, and he was so huge and so 
heavy that he wore out the stone pavements 
of the city on his way to and from the factory 
where he worked. He, too, became dirty, 
smirched with charcoal and metal filings. 
And he, also, grew daily more of a colossus 



222 THE SHIP THE GIANTS LAUNCHED 

and his voice could be heard in the rumble and 
din of the city day and night. 

The American city, also, grew as these two 
giants met and worked together in it. It was 
so big that it towered higher in the centre 
and began spilling over the edges. New and 
intricate machinery came. The city was 
tunnelled underneath and an elevated road 
was built, because there was not room enough 
for the traffic in the streets. Wealth hired 
Labor to run the cars and trains, mend the 
streets, build, tend machinery, bake, weld 
rubber and make its gas and electricity. So 
the American city grew bigger and more 
gigantic and was a wonder to the other 
countries of the world who knew how young 
it was. 

No one knows where its growth would have 
ended, for it began building aeroplanes that 
could wing their way up above the clouds, 
but the two giants fell, all at once, at odds with 
each other. 

This was quite natural, because two large 
bodies, especially two giants, are not able to 
stand together in the same place. So the 



THE SHIP THE GIANTS LAUNCHED 223 

Giant, Wealth, and the Giant, Labor, who 
each, continued to grow and puff himself out 
in a most stupendous manner, began to 
separate. Wealth put on new clothes and 
sat behind a desk in an office, and occasionally 
he spent a day at home, planning his work 
and telephoning about it. But it was still 
necessary that some one should tend the oven 
door in the iron factory and carry on the other 
work of the city that had to be done with 
hands, so Labor stayed where he had begun 
and did the same kinds of work that he had 
taken up in the beginning. 

The city offered the same parks, the same 
schools, the same hospitals, picture galleries, 
libraries, theatres, music and friends to both 
the giants and to their families, but when the 
two met after the day's work Labor was in 
overalls and Wealth had on a diamond scarf 
pin, and Labor remembered when the city 
began and Wealth had been dirty. What it 
forgot was that this had been the honest dirt 
of building a city from the ground up to the 
soot that poured out of a factory chimney. 
What it failed to understand was that Wealth 



224 THE SHIP THE GIANTS LAUNCHED 

was using a large share of his gold and brains 
to build more cities and longer transit lines 
and to string telephone and telegraph wires 
and put up factories with brighter sunshine 
and better machinery for Labor to work in. 

'1 want more money/^ the giant, Labor 
began to shout. 

'Then you must work for it," the giant, 
Wealth, urged. 

So the two began to fight. It was a dif- 
ferent and quite as disastrous fighting as our 
Revolution or our Civil War, because it 
stopped for intervals our American business 
of manufacturing and building and running 
our cities and our transportation lines; and 
these were what made us a great nation. 

Suddenly, though, in the year, 1917, a 
great cry came to the ears of our two Ameri- 
can giants from the other side of the Atlantic 
Ocean. It was made up of many smaller 
voices, Ihe crying of those who were hungry, 
and mothers who had no homes, and young 
soldiers who were dying on a battlefield for 
freedom^s sake. And all these smaller cries 
united in one mighty voice that no free nation 



THE SHIP THE GIANTS LAUNCHED 225 

could fail to hear. It called the United States 
to go back, over the course that our ship of 
freedom, the Mayflower^ had taken three 
centuries before, to the help of the Allied 
nations who were fighting for the ideals of 
freedom on the earth. 

"We must go quickly and we shall need a 
new and different ship for the voyage/^ Wealth 
said, and began to build a shipyard. Such a 
shipyard as it was; none but a giant could 
have erected it! 

Marsh land on the sea was filled in and 
covered in a few months' time with huge 
docks, administration buildings and others 
for receiving the materials for the ships and 
coal and all kinds of freight, and for housing 
the workmen. There were great, light rooms 
built where the working drawings of a ship 
could be made. Factories whose furnaces 
sent up their towers of fiery smoke every 
night rose out of the marsh like magic. Rail- 
roads stretched their steel rails to reach the 
new shipyard, and telegraph and telephone 
wires connected it with the important Ameri- 
can cities. When it was finished, this 



226 THE SHIP THE GIANTS LAUNCHED 

American shipyard extended for miles along 
the Atlantic coast and touched other new 
shipyards and spread itself over an island not 
far from the land. It was a splendid begin- 
ning, but a ship could not be built without 
Labor. That was the next need, for thousands 
of workmen, and for steel that made the 
sinews and grip of our country. 

This is the second magic of the story, how 
the ship was built, for it was done not only by 
the shipbuilders but by many other workmen 
as well who left their places in factories and 
steel mills and along the roads to have a hand 
in this colossal American undertaking. 

Our][men poured from the mines, from the 
foundries, the factories and the steel mills, 
each one with his tools and a part of a ship 
in his hands. The steel mills all over the 
country had been turning out special parts 
that were needed for our great structural 
enterprises, for building skyscrapers, bridges, 
under and over ground transportation lines, 
power plants and water front ports. Now 
these steel units were brought to the shipyard 
to be fitted t. gether and fastened, rivet hole 



THE SHIP THE GIANTS LAUNCHED 227 

meeting rivet hole, in the most wonderful ship 
building the world had ever known. The keel 
of the ship was one of the huge steel girders of 
a great railroad bridge, and its framework 
and decks were made like the steel beams and 
flooring of one of our office buildings. The 
boilers and engines were built and brought 
from long distances to the shipyard. 
Hundreds of thousands of steel rivets came by 
carloads for fastening the different parts to 
each other. The ship was measured and joined 
by steel, a single, master steel tape by which all 
other measuring tapes and forgings of the far 
away mills were gauged. Moulders, pattern 
makers, machinists, bridge builders and men 
from other trades who had never worked in a 
shipyard before toiled day and night to join 
and unite the keel, the framework and the 
floors. A man who had no trade but wanted 
to help in this building was taught by labor 
experts in the yard the work of a shipfitter, a 
riveter, a holder-on, or a heater. 

Along the miles of our new shipyards there 
arose a din so piercing that it was louder than 
the roaring of the two giants had been in the 



228 THE SHIP THE GIANTS LAUNCHED 

days before. It was the sound of steel ham- 
mering steel as everybody worked together to 
drive in the rivets of the new ship. 

Then the ship was completed and ready 
to launch. 

"What shall we call her?'' the giants asked 
themselves. And together they discovered 
that the work had named the ship while it 
was growing. Our new ship of freedom was 
the American Fabricated Freighter. She was 
a part from steam to stern of the fabric of the 
American nation, an iron framework of capital 
and labor and steel. None of these, alone, 
could have brought the materials of her 
fabric to the yard, assembled her parts and 
driven her rivets in less time than any ship 
had been built before. Shoulder to shoulder 
the two giants pushed their ship off the slip 
and she took to the sea, flying the Stars and 
Stripes proudly as she was launched on 
Decoration Day, 1918. 

More and still more fabricated ships 
followed this first one. The cry from the 
battlefields of Europe came to our shores 
again : 



THE SHIP THE GIANTS LAUNCHED 229 

^We must have food or we shall starve. 
We must have wood to rebuild our homes. 
We need coal, because our miners are fighting 
with the colors. Send us these or we shall 
perish and the war for freedom will be lost.^' 

So the new line of our ships, their wide 
steel supported decks loaded with wheat and 
fuel and building materials and courage and 
hope started across the Atlantic Ocean; 
and the two American giants, Wealth and 
Labor, side by side, watched them proudly 
from our docks until the smoke from their 
funnels was lost in the great gray trough of 
the sea. 



THE TOWN CALLED AFTER HIM 

"The town of Bismarck, Pa., has changed its 
name to Quentin." 

Quentin, young Quentin Roosevelt, 

Has a town called after him! 
Some way, as we read the word 

It makes the eyes grow dim. 

How brave they were, how young they were! 

Our boys who went to die! 
Children who played in field and street 

So short a time gone by 

Now reach the stature of the stars! 

Ah, none of us can say 
How many heavenly places 

Are named for such as they. 

But romping children here, through years 

Secured from horrors grim. 
Will speak the name of Quentin 

In the town called after him. 

Mary Stewart Cutting. 



THE LAST FIGHT 

''Hurry there! All aboard — all aboard!^' 

The American Boy in khaki hurried down 
the gang plank and boarded the great troop- 
ship as he heard the warning. The scene of 
embarkation at the Atlantic port was so thrill- 
ing that he had stopped as long as he could to 
watch it. He was a small-town boy, not so 
long through High School, and the war spirit 
and the war bustle of the city on the Atlantic 
coast to which his troop train had brought 
him was more exciting than anything he had 
ever seen in all his life before. 

Mingled with cases of ammunition and 
machinery, carts, and horses, and mules, all 
waiting their moment for embarkation, the 
Boy had seen a pressing throng on the wharf 
made up of all the Americans he had ever read 
of in his school history or known and made 
heroes of in his everyday life. 

Painted Feather, an Indian boy of direct 



232 THE LAST FIGHT 



descent from a Choctaw chief of the old 
Colonial days, stood beside a cowboy there 
on the dock; their ranches lay side by side out 
in Montana. The Boy himself had touched 
shoulders with a stalwart colored lad wearing 
the same uniform as his. And there had been 
that glorious mob of other Americans; big 
league ball players and the famous men of the 
College gridirons, automobile and motorcycle 
racers, the men who dared any adventure 
in making the movies, fearless railroad engi- 
neers, truck drivers who loved danger, the 
boys who held in their hands the trust of our 
wealth which their fathers had earned, and 
the boys who could work tractors and dig 
and build and shape machinery. It was a 
pretty fine crowd to be one of, the Boy thought, 
all wearing khaki and all lined up under the 
Stars and Stripes. The best part of it all, 
though, he decided, as the gang plank was 
hauled up, was to be steaming off for Europe 
in this particular kind of way. 

France had asked them all to come and 
England had sent this troopship from her big 
gray fleet to bring them. It was the beginning 



THE LAST FIGHT 233 



of the greatest adventure they had ever 
known. 

No, that wasn't quite the way he wanted 
to put it, the American boy began to feel, as 
his home shore sUpped out of sight and there 
was nothing to be seen but sky and sea and 
the convoys that guarded them from the 
night and day hazard of foes beneath the 
water. France had sent for him. England 
had come for him with her ship. It was his 
adventure, the American boy knew. He 
could hardly wait for it as the ship throbbed on 
her long way, slowed, and then made her 
triumphant docking at a French port. 

France, as the Boy had read of it, and 
looked at its pictures, was a kind of fairyland 
place of unfailing plenty and pleasant living 
and peace. As the troop train which was 
to carry him to the battle front started and 
he pushed to a place where he could look out 
of a window, he knew exactly what he was 
going to see. There would be little thatched, 
green villages nestling in the hollows of hills 
that were thick with sheep and fragrant with 
orchards. Every French village would have 



234 THE LAST FIGHT 



its square towered church, and the larger 
gray towns with their factories and smoking 
chimneys, each had its beautiful cathedral 
whose lace-like towers were higher than the 
chimneys. There would be miles of neat 
little farms and storied castles lying securely 
in their old parks and guarded by century old 
trees. Nearly every one would be busy 
ploughing and planting and tending quaint 
shops and keeping their cottages thriftily and 
making precious things with their hands. 
Surely no enemy force, however strong, 
would hurt such a life as that. 

But the American Boy, straining his eyes 
from the window of the troop train, saw noth- 
ing of this. He saw instead empty, shell torn 
fields and broken roads. The only landmarks 
were the ruins of what had once been homes 
and churches. From time to time a road 
would be filled with rickety wagons pulled 
by slow farm horses, and spilling over with 
their loads of furniture and household utensils. 
Very old men and women and little children 
walked beside these and they all had their 
arms full of the things they held most dear, 




From the window of the troop train, he saw ruins 
of what had once been homes and churches. 



THE LAST FIGHT 235 



the babies who couldn't walk, their tools for 
gardening, their pet rabbits and their birds 
in wicker cages. Some of these refugees were 
crying, and all had a look of fear and horror 
and despair in their faces that was new to the 
American Boy. Something must have hurt 
them almost beyond healing; something 
that was their right had been taken away 
from them, he realized. He had not thought 
very seriously before why America was send- 
ing an army to France. He had been so 
thrilled at the thought of being a part of it, 
himself, of perhaps meeting the German's 
flying circus in the air. 

Now he knew. The American Expedi- 
tionary Force had come to help take that look 
of terror out of the faces of the refugees and 
to see to it that no free born American ever 
experienced the same horror. It was more 
than an American adventure. It was a fight 
to preserve the freedom that had begun with 
the landing of the Pilgrims. It was parti- 
cularly his fight, the fight of the American 
Boy who had inherited freedom as his birth- 
right. 



236 THE LAST FIGHT 

The Front, too, was very different from 
what he had imagined it would be hke; it 
was so colossal, so gigantic, so like a great new 
business. Wiring telephone lines, rebuilding 
roads and bridges, cooking, nursing, and 
burying the dead was going on as if for a 
whole state. The Boy had never felt so alone 
in his life, and never had he been in such a 
crowd. Every highway was a tangle of 
loaded ambulances, gray motor-trucks, the 
officers' cars, endless lines of artillery, supply 
trucks, field kitchens and motor cycles that 
zig-zagged their course through the smallest 
spaces in the mass of traffic. Marching 
toward his command, the Boy was dazed 
by the turmoil he found himself in; the 
shouting of mule drivers, the cracking of 
whips, the popping of the cycles, and the 
horns of the motors mingled, and there was 
the incessant cannonade of the guns toward 
which they were moving that grew louder 
every moment. 

The Boy was glad when the march ended 
and the time came for him to begin his work. 
Even there, at the front of the Front, it was 



THE LAST FIGHT 237 



the same; an organized business of the 
advance. Every one had his own part in it, 
and was doing it vaHantly, as if it was his 
war. Painted Feather was scouting. A 
famous American baseball player had shown 
that he could throw hand grenades under 
fire. Some of the movie men were painting a 
hospital in camouflage, also under fire, and a 
football hero was rushing into machine gun 
nests to bring back the wounded of his 
company. 

Everything was ready for the Boy the day 
his part came. His aeroplane, eager for the 
wind, and as clumsy on the field as a sea fowl 
unused to the land, was oiled and already 
throbbing with the mighty whir of the screw. 

"She's working like a bird,'' the machinist 
said as the Boy climbed in between the planes. 

There was a gasp, like a cry of mingled fear 
and hope, as the engine and the aeroplane 
rose from the field and began climbing as up 
a spiral staircase, farther and farther away 
from the earth. Everything below shrunk 
to toy-size as the Boy glanced down. The 
soldiers ran to and fro like puppets, the red 



238 THE LAST FIGHT 



cross on the hospital roof was only a patch 
of color, and then a gust of air met him and 
shook him as if his machine had been a straw. 
He was rising in enormous leaps and making 
his entry into the land of the clouds. It was 
colder, although it had been summer down 
below on the earth. The Boy^s hands felt 
like stones and his heart thumped in time 
with the steady drum beat of the engine. 
All around him was a thick white curtain of 
fleece, impenetrable to the eye, but the planes 
guided him through it and into mazes of cloud, 
always higher and farther on. Still he drove 
ahead until he was several miles within the 
German lines. 

He wished he could see something. 
Strangely enough he remembered a verse that 
he had heard once in church: 

^Tet thy servant, I pray thee, turn back 
again that I may die in mine own city !^^ 

But the Boy suddenly heard the deafening 
burr of another propeller almost upon him. 
An enemy plane nosed its way through a 
cloud bank and was upon him in an instant. 



THE LAST FIGHT 239 



Just one thought flashed through the mind 
of the boy. 

^'We're both hke birds. I^m the eagle, and 
that German plane marked with black is a 
buzzard like those that fly over the dead. — 
Here goes the American eagle !^' 

Then he dived, rose, touched his gun, fired, 
and watched the buzzard drop, its trail 
marked by a line of flame. There wasn't 
any time to lose, he knew, as he turned his 
machine, took the course back and skimmed 
along through the white banks. A rain of 
fire pursued him, but he circled, rose, banked, 
dropped and escaped it. At last the firing 
stopped and his land of clouds became very 
still. And there, in front of him, he could 
see the white spires of a city. 

It was an American town, just like his home 
town. There were the same elm trees almost 
touching across the streets, and the same 
comfortable houses with service flags hang- 
ing in the windows. Children were racing 
home from school, the factory was running 
and the stores were full of food. Everybody 
seemed just as usual, busy and happy and 



240 THE LAST FIGHT 



free. The only thing that made this town 
in the clouds different from his, the American 
Boy saw, was the crowd of strangers on the 
edge of it, reaching out their hands toward 
its homes and smiling with a wonderful kind 
of joy. Where had he seen those people 
before, the Boy wondered? Then he remem- 
bered. He had seen them as refugees along 
the broken roads of France. 

Just a dream picture, of course! The Boy 
dipped, and suddenly saw the trenches that 
made the foreground of his section of the line. 
He dropped safely, but as he looked his 
aeroplane over he thought again of that city 
in the clouds. 

It was more than an American town, it was 
a world city now. It was built of the same 
logs that the Colonists had hewed and made 
into a stockade of freedom. That was why 
it had heard the call of a people in captivity 
and had sent its sons to help in a war to pre- 
serve the world^s freedom. 

''My fight!'' the American Boy said, ''and 
I did my best in it.'' 



A PROCLAMATION 

Everything for which America fought has been 
accomplished. It will now be our fortunate duty to 
assist by example, by sober, friendly counsel, and by 
material aid in the establishment of Just democracy 
throughout the world. 

By the President of the United States, 

November eleventh, 

nineteen hundred and eighteen. 



CHRONOLOGY OF MAIN EVENTS 

Referred to in Broad Stripes and Bright Stars 



The Landing or the Pilgrims 1620 

Our First Peace Table .1621 

Dutch Purchase of Manhattan 1626 

England Grants a Charter to the Massachusetts 

Bay Colony 1629 

The Sailing of the Puritans with John Winthrop 1630 

The Founding of Harvard College 1638 

English Occupation of New York 1664 

The Destruction of Jamestown 1676 

Benjamin Franklin Represents the American 

Colonies before the English Parliament . . 1766 

Daniel Boone Starts the Wilderness Road . . 1769 

The First Permanent Settlement in Kentucky . 1775 

Washington Takes Command of the Continental 

Army 1775 

The Signing of the Declaration of Independence 1776 

The Battle of Trenton 1776 



CHRONOLOGY— Continued 

Adoption by the Congress of the Flag . . . 1777 

CoRNWALLis Surrenders to Washington . . . 1781 

Treaty of Peace Between Great Britain and the 

United States Signed at Versailles .... 1783 

The Inauguration of George Washington, the 

First President of the United States . . . 1789 

The Appointment of Alexander Hamilton as the 

First Secretary of the Treasury .... 1789 

'Establishment of the First National Bank . . 1791 

Establishment of the Mint 1792 

The Trip of the First Steamboat up the Hudson 1807 

Patenting of the Reaper 1834 

Samuel Morse Perfects his Invention op the 

Telegraph 1844 

England and America United by the Atlantic 

Cable 1858 

The Battle of Gettysburg 1863 

Sherman's March to the Sea 1864 

The Centennial Exposition 1876 

The United States Enters THE World War . . 1917 

The Launching of Our Fabricated Ship . . . 1918 

A Proclamation by the President of the United 

States 1918 



